Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe [1° ed.] 1138576239, 9781138576230

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Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe

Over the past few years, increased ‘unauthorised’ migrations into the territories of Europe have resulted in one of the most severe crises in the history of the European Union. Stierl explores migration and border struggles in contemporary Europe and the ways in which they animate, problematise, and transform the region and its political formation. This volume follows public protests of migrant activists, less visible attempts of those on the move to ‘irregularly’ subvert borders, as well as new solidarities and communities that emerge in interwoven struggles for the freedom of movement. Stierl offers a conceptualisation of migrant resistances as forces of animation through which European forms of border governance can be productively explored. As catalysts that set socio-political processes into frictional motion, they are developed as modes of critical investigation, indeed, as method. By ethnographically following and being implicated in different migration struggles that contest the ways in which Europe decides over and enacts who does, and does not, belong, the author probes what they reveal about the condition of Europe in the contemporary moment. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of Migration, Border, Security and Citizenship Studies, as well as the Political Sciences more generally. Maurice Stierl is a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick. Previously, from 2015 to 2017, he was an assistant professor in Comparative Border Studies at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on migration and border struggles in contemporary ‘EUrope’ and is broadly situated in the disciplines of International Relations, International Political Sociology, and Critical Migration, Citizenship, and Border Studies. His work has appeared in the journals Antipode, Citizenship Studies, Globalizations, Movements, Global Society, Spheres, and elsewhere. Dr. Stierl is an assistant editor of Citizenship Studies, and a member of the activist project WatchTheMed Alarm Phone and the research collectives Kritnet, MobLab, New Keywords Collective, and Authority & Political Technologies.

Interventions Edited by Jenny Edkins Aberystwyth University

and Nick Vaughan-Williams University of Warwick

The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first five years we have published 60 volumes. We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics, and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical, and textual studies in international politics. We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the Series Editors: y y

Jenny Edkins ([email protected]) and Nick Vaughan-Williams ([email protected]). As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’. In this spirit The Edkins – Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary. Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA

Political Silence Meanings, Functions and Ambiguity Sophia Dingli & Thomas N. Cooke Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation Peter Nyers Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe Maurice Stierl For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/series/INT

Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe

Maurice Stierl

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Maurice Stierl The right of Maurice Stierl to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stierl, Maurice, author. Title: Migrant resistance in contemporary Europe / Maurice Stierl. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018035413 | ISBN 9781138576230 (hbk) | ISBN 9781351270472 (pdf) | ISBN 9781351270465 (epub3) | ISBN 9781351270458 (mobipocket) | ISBN 9781351270489 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: European Union countries—Emigration and immigration— Social aspects. | European Union countries—Emigration and immigration— Public opinion. | Immigrants—European Union countries—Public opinion. | Refugees—European Union countries—Public opinion. | Public opinion— European Union countries. Classification: LCC JV7590 .S75 2019 | DDC 305.9/0691094—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035413 ISBN: 978-1-138-57623-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-27048-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of images Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

ix xi xiii xvii 1

Migrant, resistance 5 EUrope in question 7 Outline of the book 10 1

Resistance as method

13

Resistance as catalyst and analytic 15 Toward an ethnography of struggle 17 Situating migrant resistance: three interventions 21 Critical Border Studies 22 The Autonomy of Migration 25 Critical Citizenship Studies 27 2

Migratory dissent Formation 35 Two worlds in one? 38 Wrong/ing names 41 Wrong/ing spaces 45 Wrong behaviour 50 Two worlds, many worlds 54 Dissensual resistance 57

33

vi

Contents

3

Migratory excess

61

Greek-EUropean border dilemmas 64 The borderscape of Lesvos 66 Jawad 69 Arash 71 Azadi 72 The borderscape of Athens 73 Research notes, Athens 74 Jaser and his family 75 The borderscape of Patras 79 The (not so) abandoned factory 80 Lives of infamous migrants 82 An excess of border violence 85 Excessive resistance 90 4

Migratory solidarity

93

We hope you will arrive 93 Boats4People 96 Where we might yet be going 97 Solidarity in embodied encounters 101 The WatchTheMed Alarm Phone 105 The Central Mediterranean route, 193 distress cases 107 The Eastern Mediterranean route, 1,582 distress cases 109 The Western Mediterranean route, 279 distress cases 112 Solidarity in unembodied encounters 115 Solidarity as resistance 118 5

Diagnostics of EUrope

123

Tracing EUrope through resistance 126 Transborder EUrope (or, EUrope as migrant) 129 Visibilising EUrope in border violence 135 Humanitarian EUrope 137 Becoming a humanitarian problem 144 Post-racial and postcolonial EUrope 147 Provincialising EUrope in racialised encounters 151 Vocalising EUrope’s umbilical connection 154 EUrope, a dilemma 157 6

Analytics of power Modalities of power 164 Biometric beatings 166 Resisting what power with what resistance? 170

163

Contents

vii

Power of life, power over life 175 Racialised power, spatialised power 177 Confusing power, creating possibilities 181 7

A speculative blueprint

185

Movements of freedom 189 Utopian yearning, utopian enactment 191 Open borders, no borders 195 Lines of flight, lines of fight 198 Bibliography Index

203 226

Images

0.1 1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1

3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2

Protest in Idomeni/Greece, December 2015 Demonstration against the Hotspot on Lesvos Island, Mytilene/Greece, March 2017 First day of Non-Citizen hunger strike at Pariser Platz, Berlin/Germany, October 2013 Third day of Non-Citizen hunger strike at Pariser Platz, Berlin/Germany, October 2013 Group of travellers released from the Moria registration centre join the Traces Back tent camp on Tsamakia beach, Lesvos/ Greece, October 2013 Factory near the southern port, Patras/Greece, November 2013 Protest of the mothers of the disappeared, Tunis/Tunisia, December 2011 WatchTheMed event at the World Social Forum, Tunis/Tunisia, 2013 Boats4People memorial at the Waterfront in Palermo/Italy, July 2012 Alarm Phone protest action in Zarzis/Tunisia, April 2018 We are not terrorist – we want peace, Idomeni/Greece, November 2015 Italian coastguards, on a Frontex mission, set a migrant boat on fire after disembarkation. Taken from Sea-Watch 2, July 2017 Protest at occupied Oranienplatz, Berlin/Germany, June 2013 Eviction of the migrant activist occupation of Oranienplatz, Berlin/Germany, April 2014 Greek-Macedonian border fence, Idomeni/Greece, December 2015 Protest along the Balkan Route, Winter 2015 Alarm Phone truck at We’ll Come United Parade in Berlin/ Germany, September 2017

4 20 38 46

69 80 99 101 104 118 137 146 157 170 174 193 200

Preface

We ran into each other at an anti-Nazi rally in Hamburg, Germany. It was probably 2005, about one year after we had first met. Mr Blakaj was still weak, recovering from the attempt to take his own life, but he wanted to show his opposition to those marching for an Aryan future in his neighbourhood. He had escaped Yugoslavia in 1989 under the threat of punishment for his involvement in underground struggles against the Milošević regime. Mr and Mrs Blakaj made a plan: he would leave first and wait for her and their three children to arrive in Austria. It worked. They met and moved on, ‘irregularly’, and eventually arrived in Hamburg, Germany. In 2004, he said to me: ‘One is ashamed to tell others that one seeks asylum. One is immediately excluded. For those people, one is an alien, a parasite’. For almost twenty years, the Blakajs were neither refugees nor ‘illegals’, only temporarily tolerated, not allowed to work, not permitted to cross the borders of the city-state Hamburg, and every six months threatened by deportation. Their neighbours were taken in the night by the German police. Over the years, Mr Blakaj’s health deteriorated. Having to wait with no end in sight caused damage to body and mind. He took pills to sleep, and others to function. Eventually, when he and his family became German citizens, Mr Blakaj returned to Kosovo to rebuild the house that the war had destroyed. Standing on the roof of his old home, he fell and broke his spine. He was flown back to Germany in a helicopter. He smiled when recalling this painful experience, pointing to the privilege that German citizenship entailed, now even to him. Mr Blakaj began to volunteer at an accommodation for asylumseekers after seeing how many ‘who carry only the clothes on their bodies’ arrived in Hamburg in 2015. His intimacy with stories of suffering made this almost unbearable, but he resigned his position only when contracting tuberculosis. ‘Maybe I will go back once I am healthy again’, he said in 2016, earning Mrs Blakaj’s stern look. I always thought of the Blakajs as some of the most courageous, most rebellious people I know, struggling every day to make life possible in a place that did not want them. But there is no account of their struggles – the ‘politically resistant’

xii

Preface

seem always to be others. One nonetheless encounters the Blakajs everywhere: In newspaper headlines and public discourse, constructed as overdetermined figures, illegals, particles of a rising tide, statistical subjects, both welfare scroungers and job thieves, threatened and threatening lives, desperate, deportable, disposable. Never as political subjects in their own right. The seed for this book was planted in my first encounter with Mr. Blakaj about fifteen years ago, certainly unknowingly at the time. I dedicate this book to you, your family, and your continuous endurance and resistance in a climate of unwantedness.

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a collective effort – it has emerged from uncountable conversations, encounters, and experiences. I am indebted to so many. First of all, I am sincerely grateful to the many individuals who have shared their stories of migration and struggle with me. In some of the most precarious situations and places I have experienced your openness and trust. I also thank all members of the Alarm Phone. Never before have I been part of an activist collective so committed and able to engage in struggles for freedom of movement, and to a degree none of us could have imagined a few years back. Unfortunately, I cannot mention all of your 130 names, so in place of that, I will refer to the shift team that adopted me when I returned to Germany a few months back: Marion Bayer, Newroz Duman, Hagen Kopp, Aaron, A. Abreham, and Corinna Zeitz. I want to thank Father Mussie Zerai for offering comfort in Cecina/Italy in 2012 and for his ongoing collaboration with the Alarm Phone. I am also grateful to these political, academic, or humanitarian networks that enact subversive political imaginaries: WatchTheMed, Welcome2Europe, Afrique-Europe-Interact, Youth without Borders, Boats4People, Kritnet, Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht & Migration, New Keywords Collective, Right to Remain, Moving Europe, No One Is Illegal, No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes, Borderline Europe, Sea-Watch, Doctors without Borders, and Jugend Rettet. Nick Vaughan-William, my former supervisor besides the brilliant James Brassett, continues to be my mentor, even though he once claimed I had committed patricide when going against his advice. His support over the past seven years has meant so much to me, opened uncountable doors, and can probably never be repaid. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Department of Politics and International Studies at Warwick University and my colleagues there, including Vicki Squire, Chris Browning, Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Chris Clarke, Ben Clift, Stuart Elden, Dominic Kelly, Georg Löfflmann, Erzsébet Strausz, Marijn Nieuwenhuis, Edward Page, Nicola Pratt, and Ben Richardson. When I came here for a Master’s Degree, I did not expect to stay for a PhD and to return now several years later as a research fellow. I want to thank the Leverhulme foundation for

xiv Acknowledgements making this possible. Through Warwick I have encountered these great souls: Chris Rossdale, who introduced me to many of my ‘academic firsts’, Hidefumi Nishiyama, Victoria Pereyra, Ciaran O’Connor, Katrine Steenland, Linda Åhäll, Mara Duer, and Lorenzo Vianelli. This is also how I first got to know the wonderful Nick Taylor, later Friederike Metternich, and again later their child and my goddaughter Rosa. I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of some initial chapters of this book and their thoughtful comments. A range of inspiring scholars, many of whom created and shaped the intellectual fields within which I engage, reviewed individual chapters of this book: Sandro Mezzadra, Kim Rygiel, Nicholas De Genova, Sunaina Maira, Peter Nyers, Anne McNevin, William Walters, Harald Bauder, Gurminder Bhambra, Natasha King, Reece Jones, Paolo Novak, Chris Rossdale, Cetta Mainwaring, Nick Taylor, Eleonora Roldán Mendívil, Helge Schwiertz, and Stellan Vinthagen. Your insights were incredibly valuable, and, of course, any remaining shortcomings are entirely my own. I want to thank the Interventions series editors Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams, as well as Ella Halstead, my editorial assistant at Routledge. I also want to thank all those who contributed their photographs to this book, in particular Marily Stroux, as well as those who supported me during my fieldwork, including Carolin Philipp, Christina Tampakopoulou, Nasim Lomani, Salinia Stroux, and Katerina Tsapopoulou. When I lived in California and worked at UC Davis, I met so many wonderful people and scholars, and I want to thank you for having made my two years there very rewarding. First of all, I must thank Sunaina Maira and Robert Irwin, who not only hired me but became great mentors and friends. It was a pleasure engaging with the affiliates of Comparative Border Studies, including Cristina Perez, Desiree Martin, Cristiana Giordano, Susette Min, Javier Arbona, Natalia Deeb Sossa, and Robyn Rodriguez, as well as with the many incredible undergraduate and graduate students at Davis. It was during my time in California that I had the great fortune to encounter Leti Volpp, Milmon Harrison, Elisa Joy White, Ricardo Dominguez, Engin Isin, Lorgia Garcia Pena, Laleh Khalili, Aklil Bekele, Caren Kaplan, Fatinha Santos, Jana Häberlein, Barbara Lüthi, Lara Kiswani, Mona Bhan, John Fife, Sherene Razack, Judith Butler, Lisa Lowe, and Walter Mignolo. Besides the many already mentioned, I want to express my gratitude to friends and colleagues, with some of whom I have collaborated: Lorenzo Pezzani, Charles Heller, Ilker Ataç, Suzan Ilcan, Feyzi Baban, Nina Perkowski, Heather Johnson, Veit Schwab, Bernd Kasparek, Christian Jakob, Sabine Hess, Nazanin Sepehri, Nina Violetta Schwarz, Marie Martin, Rahul Rao, Stefanie Kron, Sarah Schilliger, Caterina Giusa, Reem Abu-Hayyeh, Stephan Scheel, Paolo Cuttitta, Isabelle SaintSaens, Marc Speer, Aggie Hirst, Helmut Dietrich, Chris Jones, Eberhard Jungfer, Adam Larragy, Amy Thomas, Felicitas Braun, Leonie Ansems de Vries, Martina Tazzioli, and Glenda Garelli. I am forever grateful to my former De Montfort Way and Warwick Way companions: Nora Hassanaien, Marie Pettersson, Hannah

Acknowledgements xv Hetzer, Emma Biermann, Katerina Elias-Trostmann, Alex Taylor-Fowles, Chris Schulze-Solce, and Ezra Baydur. I cannot mention a range of good friends by name, but the Hamburg, Maastricht, Accra, Athens, Berkeley, Warwick, and London connections certainly know who they are. I would like to thank my entire family, and especially Manuel, Pascal, Marcel, Nele, Leander, Nathan, and Norbert for their support and encouragement. And, of course, also my mother Mi-Whoa, whose strength and creativity I never cease to admire. She is one of those who came as a ‘guest’ worker – and stayed. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Henrike Koch, who I first met when trying to ‘de-fence’ the Slovenian-Croatian border in 2016. You were closest to the phase of completing this manuscript, and I thank you for your patience, support, and everything else.

Abbreviations

AfD AoM CBS CCS EASO EEC EUNAVFOR MED EURODAC EUROPOL EUROSUR FRONTEX ICMPD IOM MRCC NATO NGO UNHCR

Alternative für Deutschland Autonomy of Migration Critical Border Studies Critical Citizenship Studies European Asylum Support Office European Economic Community European Union Naval Force Mediterranean European Dactyloscopy EU Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation European Border Surveillance System European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders International Centre for Migration Policy Development International Organization for Migration Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre North Atlantic Treaty Organization Non-governmental Organisation United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

Introduction

Border transgressions occur every day in our spatially segregated world. Human beings not meant to move do move, and those not meant to stay do stay. The stories of people who subvert borders by crossing them, or who refuse to be crossed by them, lie at the heart of this book, though they tend to amount to little more than side-notes and afterthoughts in the dominant imagination. Routinely understood as a problem to be governed, a nuisance to be silenced, and a disturbance to be deported, they imply friction (Tsing, 2005) at points that seem to demarcate a known inside from an unknown outside – the sovereign state system and its edges, the nation and its limits, the people and their other. Struggles over borders evoke their sovereign, physical, socio-political, legal, philosophical, historical, cultural, and metaphorical signification, and their volatility, by incessantly provoking the realisation, and fear, that transformation is possible. Or, rather, that transformation is already underway. It is through unauthorised movements and embodied struggles that normalised and even naturalised conceptions of the sovereign order of the world become questioned, rendered strange, and challenged. As I will demonstrate in the pages that follow, contemporary struggles around borders, in their manifold expressions, are best understood as forms of resistance in the full sense. This book conceives of migrant resistance, used interchangeably with migrant struggle, as a practice and force that complicate our understanding of both precarious forms of migration, whose subjects are routinely de-politicised, and of resistance, something that is often rendered as the, routinely heroicised, manifestation of the political. When acts of resistance seem the prerogative of certain subjectivities – in particular those that are white, male, citizen – the politicality of those who subvert borders without authorisation or who struggle to remain at a place they are ordered to leave, becomes erased. Migrant travellers, as the paradigmatic figures of vulnerability – the displaced, the ones without a home, the victims in need of others’ aid and generosity – are only rarely understood as agents of political transformation, not least given the commonly held assumption ‘that vulnerability requires and implies the need for protection and the strengthening of paternalistic forms of power at the expense of collective forms of resistance and social transformation’ (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay, 2016: 1).

2

Introduction

Conjoining migration and resistance is neither an academic exercise of romantic abstraction nor the attempt to, maybe patronisingly, give voice to the seemingly voiceless (Spivak, 1994). Rather, based on lived realities, and serving as a thought space, framework, and maybe a tool, it helps us better understand what materialises all around: deeply political and embodied mobilisations over questions of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and unbelonging, (access to) rights and resources, survival, and, more generally, the ability to lead liveable and dignified human lives. In times when governmental border regimes become ever more complex, diffused, and ingrained in the everyday, felt particularly by individuals, groups, and populations racialised as ‘other’, we witness how border enactments as well as their contestations materialise throughout society and space – in our neighbourhoods and at our places of work, in our schools, hospitals, and universities, affecting us or our relatives, our neighbours, colleagues, friends, or fellow students. Despite, or possibly due to their ubiquity, acts of resistance against regimes of mobility control are rarely recognised as what they actually constitute: some of the most significant and transformative political struggles of our time. Experiences of political research and political activism have led to this book, entangled with one another to a degree that any attempt to untie them would feel forced and ultimately fail. Based on research and activism that took place between 2011 and 2018 in Germany, Greece, Italy, Tunisia, and elsewhere, the book is shaped inasmuch by scholarly engagement as my implication in political struggles around human movement. In three ethnographic and activist studies, it traces contestations in the force field of the ‘EUropean’ border, beginning with the migrant protest cycle that emerged in Germany in 2012.1 When Mohammad Rahsepar ended his life in a communal asylum centre in southern Germany, fellow residents and friends left the camp and took to the streets. Under the slogan ‘break the isolation’ and calling themselves the Non-Citizens, they mobilised a campaign that would antagonistically claim their right to presence and participation, drawing unprecedented (media) attention to their concerns and demands. Often risking their lives in months-long hunger strikes, their practices of protest were openly confrontational and provocative, best conceived as instances of migratory dissent. For my second ethnographic study I travelled to Greece in 2013, in order to explore the ‘hidden transcripts’ and ‘infrapolitics’ of migrant resistance (Scott, 1990). In encounters with individuals, families, and groups in arrested transit on Lesvos Island, in Athens, and Patras, I wondered whether their everyday struggles seeking to localise ways of escape, conceived as migratory excess, could, or should, be understood as a form of resistance. The third study revolves around enactments of migratory solidarity as resistance. As a member of the protest campaign Boats4People that sought to end the dying in the Mediterranean Sea and organised encounters with Tunisian families of the disappeared, I chart the emergence of a transborder coalition that prompted the creation of the Alarm Phone in 2014, a 24/7 phone hotline supporting precarious movements in maritime spaces. Over the first

Introduction 3 three and a half years in operation, this activist network has engaged in more than 2,000 emergency situations at sea. Migratory dissent, excess, and solidarity are mobilised and interpreted as three specific but interrelated facets of resistance that collide with and contest diffusing border practices and materialisations throughout and beyond EUropean space. By closely following these resistances, this book conceptualises them as forces of animation and as modes of critical investigation – indeed, as method. Conceived as catalysts, they dynamically bring to light particular aspects of the EUropean border regime, a regime that seeks to regulate, differentially include, as well as deter and deport certain ‘human multiplicities’ (Foucault, 1997a: 218), commonly in the name of social order or balance, the law, economic stability, prosperity, demographics, norms, and values (Tsianos and Hess, 2010). By revealing its bordered contours, these migrant diagnostics make EUrope as such tangible, also those characteristics that are often rendered not of EUrope in its dominant presentation to the world. By exposing the different rationalities and modalities of power and violence that must necessarily come into play in the governance of (unauthorised) migrations they, moreover, constitute ‘analytics of power’ (Foucault, 1998: 90, emphasis added). When understood as such, enactments of migrant resistance help us trace the mechanics of the EUropean border regime and its extensive repertoire of violence. Only when we know the regime can we work towards its undoing. The multiplicity of migrant resistances traced in this book suggests that they are inescapably unique. Their protagonists work within varying registers of visibility and audibility, and they call different political transformations and subjectivities into being (Johnson, 2014). No straightforward commonality can be assumed between those hunger striking in Germany, precarious travellers seeking to escape Greece, and activists creating transborder solidarities across EUrope, Northern Africa, and Turkey. And yet, even if no grand narrative can or should be imposed, it does not mean that these struggles can only ever be read in a localised way, forbidding larger contextualisation. Quite the opposite is the case. While always particular and context specific, they have a transversal resonance: they animate something beyond themselves. Transversality alludes to the complex inter-relationality of spatial registers that too often become understood as cleanly delimitable, often conceived as distinct ‘units of analysis’ in global politics (Foucault, 1982). The situatedness of migration struggles at (sovereign or other) borders problematises ‘the spatial logic through which these boundaries have come to constitute and frame the conduct of international relations’ (Bleiker, 2000: 2). Moreover, the claims and transformative potential of these struggles travel, facilitated by novel digital technologies and the globalising media, beyond what are often conceived as distinct political realms. Individual expressions of resistance can provoke and engender transformations elsewhere, just as individual forms of suffering are often expressions of global economies of violence.

4

Introduction

In the contemporary context of human mass displacement, oppressive forms of mobility governance have accelerated the erosion of possibilities to safely stay, leave, or arrive elsewhere for a significant part of the world’s population (Walia, 2012; Anderson, Sharma and Wright, 2009). It is through resistances to enforced im/mobilisation that forms of violence are exposed which our bordered world must necessarily, and constantly, produce. For me, migrant resistances are more than momentary noises disturbing the ongoing sovereign sound. Through their struggles, they probe the dominant political imaginaries of the present, and often prefigure alternative ways of being-with one another and of living communally, despite difference. When one accepts their politicality, one begins to think migrations, borders, and resistance differently. I do not claim to be able to exhaustively portray these struggles but hope to capture some of their essential characteristics. Some continue to exist, sometimes changing direction and shape or momentarily disappearing only to re-emerge in different contexts, anecdotes, and formations. In their own ways, they contributed to the large-scale political transformations that continue to unfold in contemporary EUrope and throughout the world. Deeply indebted to those who struggle, this book points to the necessary and valuable task to understand migrant resistances as crucial moments and movements through which the political can, and must, be thought.

Image 0.1 Protest in Idomeni/Greece, December 2015 Source: L.M. for Moving Europe

Introduction 5

Migrant, resistance How do unauthorised migration and resistance relate? If we accept that we live in a time of hegemonic mobility control, itself inscribed in global systems of inequality, can or should we conceive of unruly acts of border crossing as acts of resistance (Hess, 2017)? After all, and following Achille Mbembe (2017), have not ‘struggles for freedom and self-determination [. . .] always been intertwined with the aspiration to move unchained’? Isn’t the project of migration the enactment of a ‘utopian yearning’, so that, as John Akomfrah (2016) puts it, ‘everyone who leaves is a rebel who is saying no to somewhere’? Is the ‘refugee movement’, then, as Angela Davis held when visiting a school occupied by migrant protesters in Berlin, indeed ‘the movement of the 21st century’ (Tosco Berlin, 2014; Chapter 2)? What is the danger of connecting migration and resistance – the romanisation of and projecting onto ‘the other’, the stretching out of the term resistance so that it may lose all analytic purchase, the politicisation of politically ‘unconscious’ struggles for ‘mere’ survival, the spectacularisation of particular moments in often lengthy migration projects, or the inadequate focus on certain subjects, who, despite all obstacles, are still able to move, unlike others who are immobilised by a thoroughly gendered and ableist border regime? Do we need to reserve the term resistance for collective and visible movements that mobilise more than migrants across borders – movements that make their claims of political transformation audible and legible, rather than often quietly enacting ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott, 1990)? Should we abandon it altogether and settle on other notions, such as ‘appropriation’ as proposed by Stephan Scheel (2017: 60), which would be ‘better equipped than the inherently reactive concept of resistance to account for the constitutive role that practices of subversion and dissent by the governed play in the transformation of regimes of governance’? How about ‘becoming imperceptible’, introduced by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos (2008: 217), as an ‘immanent act of resistance’, rather than resistance per se? For them (2008: 71), imperceptibility is better suited to account for today’s struggles over mobility, not least as we face ‘the predicament of resistance’ as they call it, the dilemma of seeing ‘traditional forms of resistance (especially in the forms of party and trade union politics)’ lose their efficacy while the resistances of ‘identity politics, micropolitics and cultural politics’ have become ‘increasingly compromised by their entanglement in neoliberal forms of governance’. Alternatively, could unauthorised migration and struggles to stay be conceived, with Asef Bayat (2010: 19–20, emphases in original), as ‘social nonmovements’, as ‘the collective actions of noncollective actors’, which, in contrast to social movements do not engage in ‘extraordinary deeds of mobilization and protestation that go beyond the routine of daily life [but] are made up of practices that are merged into, indeed are part and parcel of, the ordinary practices of everyday life’? Or, do they, to the contrary, constitute

6

Introduction

‘social movements in the full sense’, as Sandro Mezzadra (2004: 270, emphasis in original) has suggested, that consciously or not, and by ‘reclaiming [. . .] a “right to escape” [constitute] a material critique of the international division of labour and [mark] profoundly the subjectivity of the migrant also in the country where she/he chooses to settle down’? This book seeks to find some answers to these testing questions by following different migrant mobilisations and by listening to their own demands and claims. The term migrant resistance, as an umbrella term for diverse manifestations of struggle, guarantees their reading as entangled processes, where unauthorised migration is placed, or, rather, where it places itself, in the (conceptual) realm of political struggle, and where political struggle is, or becomes, migratory. What I seek to do with this conjoined term is to question, following Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson (2006), the divide between movement understood in a political register (as political actors and/or forces more or less representable) and movement undertaken in a kinetic sense (as a passage between points on the globe or from one point to an unknown or unreachable destination). Migrant resistance connects what they (2006) have importantly cautioned not to keep separate: To keep these two senses of movement separate not only denies political meaning to the passages of migration but, also, fails to think through the complexities of political movement as such, not simply as the incompleteness and risk of every politics but, more crucially, as the necessarily kinetic aspects of political movements that might be something more, or indeed other, than representational. It is, precisely, in separating migrant movement from political movement that the transformative potential, which lies somewhere in-between, is lost. ‘The (citizen) activist’ acts, usually on ‘the migrant’s’ behalf. The migrant has merely moved into a geographic space that is transformed by the activist, and other constituent actors and forces, into a sphere of politics. Instead of perpetuating this unfortunate separation, this book follows the resistant movements and practices of migrant activists (Nyers and Rygiel, 2012; Sajed, 2012). They are situated at the ‘nexus of “movement as politics” and “movement as motion” [which challenges] the demarcations that define politics as always, inexorably, national and/or sovereign’ (Mitropoulos and Neilson, 2006). Their practices of crossing borders or of mobilising to stay are nothing ordinary in this extraordinary world that maintains and reinforces global inequalities and hierarchies through mobility control. Migration struggles in their diversity and complexity are reminders of resistances’ plurality. Though I foreground forms of resistance in my enquiry, I do not

Introduction 7 intend to offer a reductive definition as a priori. In this way, I work against the often-dominant desires to find resistance’s supposed formula or easily grasped substance, to assign to it stable and often heroic characteristics, or to render it merely oppositional to ‘holders of power’. Resistance is often only acknowledged when it is wrapped in vocalised intent or public acknowledgement, when it bears success or tragic failure. It is routinely written into a mythical final stroke to come, the future revolutionary upheaval overturning the misery of the present. Reductive readings of resistances silence their multiplicities, ambiguities, and potentialities. It is thus important, as Mikael Baaz, Mona Lilja, and Stellan Vinthagen (2017: 4) have argued, to find ways to grasp the varied ‘articulations’ of resistance and not to be blind to its ‘impressive variation’. Articulations of migrant resistance cannot be categorised into neat oppositions between the visible and invisible, the organised and everyday, the individual and collective, migrant movements vis-à-vis social movements, mobilisations to cross borders versus mobilisations to produce political change. The protagonists of migrant resistance make an ‘individual motion [. . .] of desertion’ (Mezzadra, 2004: 270), sometimes seeking to quietly subvert this or that border and building ‘mobile commons’ in transit (Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, 2008), while at other times hunger striking in the centre of public attention, or forming solidarity coalitions that subvert in-themselves the divisions that border regimes generate. While they are entangled in power relations, this does not mean that they are mere reactions, ‘forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat’ (Foucault, 1998: 96). Rather, and if they have one aspect in common, they are constitutive forces that challenge and thereby shape the border regime. In doing so, they form ‘“constructive” or “proactive” resistance, articulations where resistance is actually creating new and different subjectivities, social relations and institutions, and are not (only) hindering or undermining them’, and thereby raise doubt about ‘the most common (mis) understanding of resistance’ (Baaz, Lilja and Vinthagen, 2017: 33), conceptions of resistance as something passive or re-active, as simply domination’s underside.

EUrope in question The migrant resistances explored in this book take place in the context and force field of EUrope. EUrope is often reduced to rather empty signifiers – a post- or supra-national community, an intergovernmental organisation, the lowest common denominator in an anarchic and sovereign world system, a polity of cosmopolitan design, a normative soft power, a civil and civilising force, or a hybrid construct of all of the above. Though it constitutes an amalgam of fractured and at times contradictory traits and not an easily definable or coherent singularity, this book proposes that an image of EUrope comes to the fore when attention is paid to contestations over migrations and borders. While Jacques Derrida’s puzzle (1992: 5, emphases in original) what EUrope is, ‘even if we no longer know very well what or who goes by

8

Introduction

this name’, cannot be conclusively resolved, I suggest in response to his questions raised a quarter century ago – ‘to what concept [. . .], to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw up its borders?’ – that EUrope becomes nameable precisely in the process of drawing up and governing borders. And, even more forcefully, through acts of resistance contesting these border-drawings. Responding to its desire to govern mobilities and to ‘create the conditions for the orderly movement of bodies by the millions’ (Feldman, 2012: 180), EUrope draws and enforces its borders through the interplay of a range of institutions, agencies, policies, technologies, regulations, rationales, and agreements. Given such complexity and in the absence of a demarcatable ‘sovereign head’, it is not always clear what is done at the behest of EU institutions or EU member states, or both. In this book, the neologism ‘EUrope’ is employed throughout to complicate the ways in which levels and scales of authority and governance are imagined as distinct, ostensibly allowing to neatly differentiate between what is done in the name of the ‘supra-national’ EU (commonly by reference to its institutions) or in the name of particular nation-states (commonly by reference to member-state governments). As discussed in greater depth later on, especially in questions of mobility governance, we have seen a EUropean border regime emerge through the intense entanglement of different levels of authority and governance that renders neat distinction-makings untenable, only superficially offering conceptual clarity but failing to correspond with messy realities. Though at the forefront of developing governmental techniques to facilitate some movements while subjugating, slowing down, or blocking others, EUrope’s border regime was unable to deter and regulate the migratory movements of more than one million people across the Mediterranean Sea, onto, and throughout the continent in 2015. Without authorisation, they overcame EUrope’s external governmental bulwark and its complex mesh of visa restrictions, migrant deterrence agreements with third countries, carrier sanctions, illegal push-back operations, and other territorial and extraterritorial forms of border policing. Not only that, many also defied EUrope’s internal attempts to deter. In organised mass marches and under the rallying cry ‘open the border’, or through more imperceptible border transgressions, various EUropean (and European) borders were pried open. Contrary to the dominant narrative suggesting that they were ‘invited’ into EUrope, they, instead, migrated to places where they had sought to ‘make home’ all along, often where family and community networks already existed. Without glorifying or romanticising these unauthorised movements, it is clear that what we have witnessed over the past years has been truly historic – enactments of migratory mass disobedience on an unprecedented scale effectively dismantling a hegemonic regime of population control. What has come to be called a migration or refugee crisis, was, more than anything else, a crisis of the EUropean border regime and of EUrope itself (New Keywords Collective, 2016). The question of EUrope may have never been raised with greater

Introduction 9 urgency than following that year of mass crossings and the grave socio-political transformations they have triggered (De Genova, 2016). EUrope’s very being and future seem to hang in the balance. Current processes of internal re-bordering along sovereign nation-state lines and logics significantly challenge one of EUrope’s corner stones, the idea of internal freedom of movement, and thereby its supposed post-national ethos and transborder imaginary. Barbed-wired fences have emerged along the edges of EUropean (and European) nation-states, between Hungary, Serbia and Croatia, Bulgaria and Turkey, Austria and Slovenia, Macedonia and Greece. Border conflicts, believed to have long been relegated to past times, are not uncommon anymore. Attempts to find concerted responses to the so-called crisis were hampered by internal fragmentation among EUropean member states and institutions. Moreover, with the intended withdrawal of the UK from the EU following the June 2016 Brexit referendum, the union will shrink as a direct consequence of the mass crossings. There is a certain irony to it that these processes of closure constitute reactions to disobedient enactments of free movement. And yet, despite what arguably constitutes the most severe crisis of the EUropean ‘project’ to date, we can also detect intensified processes of EUropeanisation as reactions to 2015’s ‘long summer of migration’ (Kasparek and Speer, 2015). Carried by virulent anti-migrant populism, and emergency and crisis rhetoric, EUrope has reinforced its layers of deterrence at a rapid pace. For the European Commission (Rankin, 2017), only a concerted EUropean approach would be able to address the challenge of unauthorised migration: Returning to a pre-crisis mode of isolated, uncoordinated, national action is not an option and would betray years’ worth of collective work to better the collective European response to managing migration. The closure of the Balkan route and the EU-Turkey deal of March 2016 signalled the beginnings of a phase of EUropean border enforcement that while certainly not abruptly coming into being with all its historic precursors and precedents, seems underpinned by a novel dynamic and intensity (see Chapter 5). EUrope’s proliferating and externalising borders are accompanied by a growing diversification of border-related forms of violence, experienced by subjects situated throughout and way beyond the territories commonly believed to compose EUrope, which often means that they are hidden from sight, seemingly never of EUrope. In this book, migration struggles are conceived as forces that allow us to trace EUropean border governance and its violence, and in this way, help make EUrope as such legible, despite its many names and complex shape. If the making and enforcing of borders is fundamental to identity constructions, then resistances to such enforcements confront also the imagined identity and community they seem to guard and (re-)produce. In this sense, migration struggles not merely problematise this or that border materialisation, this or that policy, this or that

10

Introduction

dehumanising discourse, but EUrope as such, or at least the dominant frames through which a collective EUropean identity is constructed and made recognisable. As diagnostics, migrant resistances problematise EUrope, by unmasking not only the ways in which its borders are enacted materially and corporeally, but also the discourses, rationales, and truths underlying these divisionary practices. In the process, they de-centre and distort EUrope’s narrative as a community of peace, unity, and humanitarianism, and make space for alternative framings as well as other communal imaginaries. Seeking to foster a bounded community, EUrope designates its ‘others’. When these others begin to challenge their marginalisation and exclusion, thus resisting the processes of being othered, and when we pay attention to their struggles, we begin to see how a EUrope emerges before our eyes that conflicts fundamentally with its dominant (self-)conception, with the idea of itself as a transborder polity that has overcome (nationalist) logics of ‘us versus them’, as a normative power and humanitarian force that leads by example, and as a community where race and racism have no say anymore.

Outline of the book This book is organised into seven substantive chapters. Chapter 1 sketches out the idea of resistance as method, arguing that it can provide productive openings to ethnographically explore the ways in which migrant struggles contest and thereby expose technologies, practices, and rationales that underpin and enact EUropean migration governance. Drawing from Foucault’s writing on resistance, power, and governance, in which he moves away from a dualistic logic that positions resistance as power’s stable counterpart, it focuses on the complex and entangled relations between forces of (border) power and those of (migrant) resistance. This chapter also makes the case for a critical and principled stance, indeed a form of ‘research militancy’, when exploring the politics of migration and borders, and concludes by situating the approach, to conceive resistance as method, in three interrelated bodies of work that have opened up important ways of rethinking migration, its subjects, and contemporary borders: Critical Border Studies, the Autonomy of Migration, and Critical Citizenship Studies. The subsequent three chapters offer ethnographic accounts of particular migration struggles that are explored under the headings of migratory dissent, excess, and solidarity. Chapter 2 gives an account of a cycle of migrant protests in Germany that emerged in 2012 as a response to the suicide of a resident of a communal asylum centre in the city of Würzburg. Following Rahsepar’s death, fellow residents began to organise protests of unprecedented intensity, scale, and duration that challenged, in an often antagonistic manner, the laws, actors, and discourses that forced them into what they conceived as ‘non-citizenship’, a state of marginality and ‘deportability’ (De Genova, 2002). The Non-Citizen activists staged their political campaigns in various demonstrations, occupations, and hunger strikes,

Introduction 11 demanding to be heard and seen as political subjects. Their uncompromising interventions posed a series of difficult questions, not only to (state) authorities but also to their supporters. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work on dissensus and Citizenship Studies scholarship, this chapter conceptualises the Non-Citizen struggle as a form of migratory dissent, continuously engaging with the fundamental question posed by Rancière (1992: 60): ‘Do we or do we not belong to the category of men or citizens or human beings, and what follows from this?’ Chapter 3 traces much less publicly confrontational and visible forms of migrant struggle. It follows several attempts by irregularised travellers to clandestinely subvert Greek borders in order to move to northern EUrope. The island of Lesvos, the capital city of Athens, and the coastal city of Patras constitute three particular, but connected ‘borderscapes’ (Perera, 2007) where people in transit hope to find the paths to, and means for, their eventual escape. Through the narration of their experiences in arrested transit, the chapter wonders whether their everyday strategies of survival and attempts to find ways to cross borders in an unauthorised manner can or should be thought of as a form of resistance. Closely linked to Autonomy of Migration scholarship as well as Foucault’s conception of infamy, I probe the idea of migratory excess as signifying resistance, underwritten by the creative human potentiality to remain or become ‘otherwise’, to re-imagine and reinvent one’s possibilities, even in conditions of extreme violence and subjection. Chapter 4 revolves around the role of solidarity in migration struggles. I chart the coming together of various individuals and groups for the Boats4People campaign in 2012 that protested the mass dying in the Mediterranean Sea and led to encounters with Tunisian parents whose children had disappeared in the attempt to cross the sea. With help of Sara Ahmed’s writing, I explore these complex embodied encounters between people situated in different ‘life worlds’ and probe what forms of collective struggle may emerge from them. What began with Boats4People as a (failed) attempt to actively intervene in the Mediterranean turned into the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone in 2014, an activist network able to support tens of thousands of people while in distress at sea. In these direct but rather unembodied encounters, a form of solidarity materialised between individuals who were, and often remained, unknown to one another. As a member of both Boats4People and the Alarm Phone, I conceptualise these embodied and unembodied encounters as underpinned by a form of resistance that expresses itself through migratory solidarity. Chapter 5 builds on the three ethnographic studies and explores what migrant struggles reveal about the condition of EUrope in the contemporary moment. Conceiving these struggles as diagnostics of EUrope, it highlights how their contestations bring to light dominant frames through which EUrope narrates and presents itself to the world – namely as a political formation of transborder design, as underpinned by a humanitarian ethos, and as characterised by a post-racial and postcolonial reality. Building on Judith Butler’s (2009) concept of framing, the chapter shows how EUrope’s divisionary practices become (discursively) constructed in ways that seek

12

Introduction

to rationalise, explain, or justify border practices that must inevitably and violently enact who belongs to EUrope’s community and who does not. Acts of migrant resistance not only animate these dominant frames but also distort and de-centre them, and thereby make space for alternative communal imaginaries. Chapter 6 examines whether the different forms of migrant resistance – broadly conceived under the rubrics of dissent, excess, and solidarity – correspond with particular modalities of power, especially those conceptualised by Foucault as sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical power. As analytics, migrant resistances point to different modalities of power that come into play in the governance of migration. They reveal the entanglement between what are commonly perceived to be distinct characteristics of power, often differentiated between a power of life vis-à-vis a power over life. This chapter argues that only when their entanglement is acknowledged, can we begin to explain how a biopolitical (border) regime is able to kill. I seek to show how the biopolitical sorting of migratory populations is indispensably connected to disciplinary orderings as well as necropolitical endings (Mbembe, 2003). Although subjected to these interwoven powers, the protagonists of migrant resistance themselves constitutively shape and confuse relations of power, bring their imperatives into friction, and thereby open up new political possibilities. The concluding Chapter 7 seeks to offer a ‘speculative blueprint’ (Weheliye, 2014: 14) towards a less violent and segregated world, inspired by the many migrant struggles followed in this book. While they are not prescriptive of a better world to come, they can be conceived as prefigurative transformations constitutive of a world that will look quite different to the one we inhabit at the moment. Understanding their disobedient movements as movements of freedom, situated somewhere between movement conceived as motion and politics, they offer lines of flight, and lines of fight. Taking on Foucault’s call for a ‘hyper- and pessimistic activism’ (2000a: 256), this chapter concludes by arguing against apathy and for the creation of coalitions of struggle that work collectively towards alternative political horizons, and for which migratory enactments of freedom can give the spark.

Note 1 In this book, the neologism ‘EUrope’ is used throughout. As further explored in Chapter 5, it problematises frequently employed usages that equate the EU with Europe and Europe with the EU and suggests, at the same time, that EUrope is not reducible to the institutions of the EU.

1

Resistance as method

If we allow ourselves to conceive of practices of migrant resistance, and seek to enquire into that what becomes animated by them, where do we even begin to look? An approach that begins enquiries with resistances but without giving them a concise contour other than subsuming them broadly under the notions of dissent, excess, and solidarity, may appear as a methodological dead-end, conflicting with assumptions of linearity that underlie most social science research designs. However, avoiding an established and pre-formulated theory or definition of migrant resistance that would then be ‘tested on the ground’ seems crucial in order not to unnecessarily foreclose the ability to grasp its varied articulations. Certainly, one has to be drawn somewhere, and one has to have an initial assumption of what form or shape practices of resistance might take. All over the world there certainly is no shortage of contentions over (im)mobility and borders, and they will not disappear in the foreseeable future, not least as they are deeply connected to some of the major human-made crises of our time: devastating wars and conflicts, catastrophic environmental degradation, rampant capitalist exploitation and widespread poverty, to name a few. When struggles over movement materialise, they often reveal and bring into relation the larger structural forces and forms of violence at work that have perpetuated the desire and need to leave, to escape, to cross borders, as well as to stay where one is threatened to be displaced from. In my own research, the question of ‘where to look’ was closely connected to my activist engagement and thus necessarily tied to the ‘what to do’ question. My implication in activist collectives that support disobedient movements has provided me with a sort of compass, a sense of direction, continuously shaping my understanding of resistance and the potential for political transformation. Especially engaging in the Alarm Phone, subject of Chapter 4, and its direct interventions in the Mediterranean borderzone, has been, and continues to be, a crucial experience of ever-expanding political possibility. At the same time, many of the enquiries in this book were shaped, in one way or another, by personal experiences and encounters that long preceded any activist or academic involvement. The constant exposure, throughout my life, to questions about where

14

Resistance as method

to locate my ‘real home’, given my partly non-EUropean heritage, has certainly prompted many of the questions raised on the pages that follow, revolving around racialised othering and what it might mean to belong. It seems fitting that I wrap up the manuscript for this book where I grew up, in Germany, but where, until recently, I could have never imagined to return to after I left in 2005. The enquiries of this book were thus not shaped in a vacuum but through my theoretical-empirical engagement and implication in that ‘what there is’, and through my subjective entanglement in a world that is, beside everything else, marked by radical inequality and abyssal violence. When I first thought about following migrant resistances and contemplated the scope of my project, I was drawn to border sites that, in the EUropean context, symbolised both border brutality and fierce migrant resistance – Lampedusa, Calais, Ceuta, and Melilla. In the end, my research interests and involvement in political campaigns took me elsewhere, including Munich, Berlin, Palermo, Lesvos, Athens, Patras, and Tunis. While all migrant resistances I encountered there had precursors, some had just begun to form, unfold, or accelerate, and several were not tied to a singular place. My ability to follow them varied considerably, depending on factors related to their different locations, realities, and progressions, as well as my connections to their protagonists and related (migrant) activist networks. Some connections opened up through chance encounters and were initially not conceived as ‘research opportunities’, while others could not be followed due to little available resources or time constraints on my part. Importantly, to retroactively create a supposed conceptual, methodological, or even chronological order, as final ‘research products’ often insinuate, would be misleading. During the practice of researching and writing, there was hardly any linearity, but a perpetual moving back and forth between various sites and struggles, literatures, methods, and theories, all intensely tied to and constitutive of one another. What did drive my research throughout, however, was the desire to probe and challenge dominant conceptions of resistance, in particular those that seemed to reserve the label of ‘resistant subject’ solely for individuals – often white, middleclass, male, EUropean, citizen – engaged in highly visible, seemingly unified, and at times spectacular contestations of (state) authorities and systems of power. Often framed as a global civil society expressing dissent in the form of collective social movements, social movement theory has regularly failed to grasp the importance of migrant struggles that materialise and are politically transformative in different but significant ways. Given my dissatisfaction with what often seemed narrow and exclusionary accounts of resistance, I sought to shift my attention to other sites and materialisations of struggle, to engage with other conceptions of what resistance might be or might become. Beginning my enquiries with a rather broad understanding of resistance was challenging, but, over time, I became increasingly encouraged to ethnographically follow migrant struggles and enquire into the dynamics they themselves set into motion, revealing their own characteristics and political potentialities in the process, as well as the conditions of subjection they

Resistance as method 15 found themselves entangled in. Without a blueprint for such approach, I sought, besides the ‘practical theorisations’ of migrant resistances themselves, guidance in Foucault’s (1994a: 523–524) conceptual ‘tool-box’ that, as he declared, was meant ‘for users, not readers’. More than any particular interview, lecture, article, or book, it was his ethos of critical investigation that I sought to follow and capture with the idea of resistance as method.

Resistance as catalyst and analytic Foucault (1994b: 453) once said that an anti-strategic ethics informed his investigations that took seriously ‘a particular death, a particular cry, a particular revolt’. His attention to subjects considered marginal in society, the mentally ill, delinquents, sexual ‘deviants’, or prison inmates, revealed the socio-political processes that rationalised their governance and subjection in the name of (human) nature, order, truth, or norm. Crucially, Foucault did not simply philosophise in the abstract about their potentiality to resist. Rather, he (1994b: 452) never questioned that they did: People do revolt; that is a fact. And that is how subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history, breathing life into it. A convict risks his life to protest unjust punishments; a madman can no longer bear being confined and humiliated; a people refuses the regime that oppresses it. Foucault most explicitly discussed enactments of resistance when elaborating on anti-pastoral revolts in ecclesiastical institutions that appeared in late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century Europe. For him (2009: 201, 148), these counterconducts, as he termed the ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’, were forces through which one could analyse the dominant characteristics of this ‘pastoral power’: We may even say that the importance, vigor, and depth of implantation of this pastoral power can be measured by the intensity and multiplicity of agitations, revolts, discontent, struggles, battles, and bloody wars that have been conducted around, for, and against it. Importantly, Foucault’s (2009: 200–201) characterisation of these insurrections as counter-conducts followed a process of elimination: revolt was ‘too precise and too strong’, disobedience too weak, insubordination ‘attached to military insubordination’, dissidence too historically loaded and localised, misconduct too passive. By settling on counter-conduct, he departed from dominant conceptions of resistance as power’s stable other or as a substance held merely in radical-progressive spaces, not least as certain supposed bastions of resistance themselves could function, as Foucault (2009: 199) once wrote (presumably with the French Communist Party in mind),

16

Resistance as method internally as a sort of different pastorate, a different governmentality with its chiefs, its rules, and its principles of obedience, and to that extent it possesses [. . .] a considerable capacity both to appear as a different society, a different form of conduct, and to channel revolts of conduct, take them over, and control them.

By emphasising the importance of routinely overlooked micro-practices of resistance in not so visible spaces, Foucault (2009: 120, footnotes) paid attention to how ‘it is entirely possible to arrive at overall effects, not by concerted confrontations, but also by local or lateral or diagonal attacks that bring into play the general economy of the whole’, which meant, for him, ‘that it may be worth the effort to continue with experiment’. What he (1998: 92–93) seems to mean by ‘experiment’ is a different way of examination, one that locates and follows these local, lateral, diagonal attacks instead of concerted confrontations to enquire into how power relations and ‘social hegemonies’ function, become contested, and modified. Understanding counter-conducts as both important transformative practices and vessels to investigate power relations, ‘an entire field of possible research’ opened up for Foucault (2009: 228). However, he rarely took up the task himself. This is what this book endeavours to do. Throughout, I will understand migrant resistances as catalysts: I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. [. . .] [I]n order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations. (Foucault, 1982: 780, emphasis added) Resistances conceived as catalysts, considered ‘substances increasing the rate of a reaction without themselves being consumed’ (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014), allow for dynamic enquiries of power relations that form and maintain social hegemonies. However, rather than being conceived as a substance, a solid matter with uniform properties, resistance can be understood as an embodied practice materialising in social interactions. In the motions that they create, forces of resistance animate themselves, that with which they collide, and the many reverberations that they cause, all of which are intimately interrelated. As an ‘analytics of power’ (Foucault, 1998: 90), acts of resistance shed light on various aspects that were in the dark prior to their frictional movements. The enquiries in this book thus follow

Resistance as method 17 migration struggles, conceptualised as catalysts that set socio-political forces into motion, as well as analytics of power relations. As I will show, in the thicket of diffuse forms of border control, these struggles and their demands for social and political transformation help us dynamically trace the relations of power that compose a system, or rather, a regime of mobility governance.

Toward an ethnography of struggle A method, Foucault (2009: 119, footnotes) once held with characteristic playfulness, should not ‘be a stake in itself’ but, rather, ‘be made in order to get rid of it’. The proposition that this book makes, to see resistance as method, is, of course, conditional on its value to provide an experimental gaze and analytical grid through which insights into contestations over mobility are won. For Foucault (2000b: 315, 319, emphasis in original), a critical attitude is a ‘limit-attitude’, one that occasions an ‘analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’. In following migration struggles and the ‘subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 2004: 241) they generate, we learn about some of the mechanisms through which their exclusions and abjections become operated and justified, as well as, and importantly, about the weaknesses, pressure points, and fallibilities of regimes of control. As ‘border elements’ (Foucault, 2009: 215), situated materially, discursively, and symbolically at the junctures of un/belonging, they draw attention to the ways in which sovereign insides and outsides are articulated, justified, and enacted, made and unmade. Tracing them, as method, seems to allow, literally, for a critical interrogation of our present condition from the frontiers. As they inevitably appear in the context of borders, understood as more than sovereign lines, they are experiments at imposed limits, shedding light on both limitations and possibilities of going beyond them (Dillon, 1999; Soguk, 1999). If we want to follow these methodological possibilities and move towards an ethnography of struggle, method itself seems in need of decolonisation (Smith, 1999). It feels crucial to avoid replicating what R.B.J. Walker (2010: 257–258) calls ‘analytical procedures that presume a radical dualism as a ground of scholarly credibility’. One of these radical dualisms is the dominant binary understanding of theory and method where the latter must temporally and conceptually succeed the former. In this sense, a theoretical framework of resistance would become, in a secondary move, methodologically investigated and tested in ‘the field’. Rather than a narrow set of principles that guides research on phenomena ‘out there’, however, method can be understood differently, as the enactment of critical theory by a relational, situated, and subjective being. Method is political and performative, creatively producing realities, making ‘new signals and new resonances, new manifestations and new concealments’ (Law, 2004: 143). Often thought as something constraining, method can be a practice of opening up social phenomena rather than reducing their complexities to simplifying formulas. Marysia Zalewski’s (1996:

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350, 346) proposition to overcome ‘theoretical imperialism’ by regarding theory as an ‘everyday practice’ and a ‘verb’ is particularly relevant here: ‘thinking of theory as verb implies that what one does is “theorise” rather than “use theory”’. Theorising seen as an everyday process, similar to resistance itself, also implies that it ‘is not confined either to policy makers or to academics’ (1996: 346). My multi-sited ethnography of migrant resistances is informed by recent ethnographic trajectories that allow for greater methodological pluralism and acknowledge the political nature of social science research, often moving beyond traditional anthropological ways of ‘going native’ and seeking ‘embeddedness’. Rather than finding definitive answers in ‘the field’ that are merely transcribed into accurate accounts of the experience ‘on the ground’, ethnography, for Wanda Vrasti (2013: 17), ‘requires constant travelling back and forth between the part and the whole, experience and text, fieldwork and theory’. She conceives of ‘ethnographic improvisation’ as ‘a textual strategy for building theory from the disparate events, statements, experiences, dilemmas and surprises I encountered during my travels, but also at home, at my desk, in libraries, at conferences and during seminars’. George Marcus’ work on multi-sitedness has been critical in developing ethnographic methods that can account for dynamic practices and patterns which classic research paradigms often fail to capture. Researching heterogeneous socio-political phenomena and actors, he envisions an ethnographic method of ‘following’. The ethnographer as a ‘circumstantial activist’ follows ‘people’, ‘the thing’, ‘the metaphor’, ‘the plot, story, or allegory’, ‘the life or biography’, or ‘the conflict’ (Marcus, 1995: 105). More than circumstantial activism, an ethnography of struggle compels engaged activism as research, where research is an ethical and practical task (Craven and Davis, 2013). Soyini Madison (2005: 5, emphasis in original), for example, envisions an ethnography which ‘begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain’. Going further, and understanding ethnography as a collective practice, Jeffrey Juris (2007: 173) advocates for ‘militant ethnography’ as ‘a politically engaged and collaborative form of participant observation carried out from within rather than outside grassroots movements’. This book engages in analytical improvisation and methodological eclecticism and draws from diverse but interrelated ethnographic registers. Reflexive and critical enquiry is not only based upon an awareness of (dominant) forms of knowledge production and implies a process of unlearning them but constitutes also ‘a self-conscious posture counteracting the potential idleness of empirical research’, an attempt to avoid ‘a disengagement [. . .] from acknowledging and accepting the political posture behind every choice made in the mediation between ontology, epistemology, and methods’ (Guillaume, 2013: 29). In an ethnography of struggle, distinctions between subject/ object or researcher/participant become blurred. Travelling, conceptually, temporally, and spatially between multiple sites is possible, as is the political implication of the researcher, as advocate, activist, and militant.

Resistance as method 19 Researching migrations and their struggles is a complex endeavour. It is hardly possible through objectivist research paradigms and narrow methodologies that continue to inform and direct significant parts of migration or refugee studies scholarship, and the political and social sciences more broadly. Presupposing that migration could be studied in an unbiased, value-neutral, and detached manner, often from a peculiar bird’s eye perspective, these paradigms disregard not only migration’s contested and relational nature but efface also the researcher’s responsibility for produced knowledges. Migration governance is becoming increasingly a knowledge-based endeavour and business, not only implicating universities in schemes of migration policing but also drawing from studies on migration, economic and managerial discourses, languages of human rights and good governance that often emanate from the academic sphere. Especially following the mass migration movements of 2015, academic research on migration to EUrope has gained attention unlike ever before, leading to increased funding of ‘policy relevant’ scholarship which, in turn, guarantees its circulation, readership, and continuous funding. Hegemonic regimes of people-filtering thrive on supposedly impartial scholarship in their desire to understand, trace, and ultimately control precarious migration projects. Several of today’s migration managers draw from academic expertise and are research-prone themselves, including the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), whose supposedly value-neutral and objective research fertilises the work of national or supra-national border enforcers, including EUrope’s border agency Frontex (see Geiger and Pécoud, 2014; Scheel and Ratfisch, 2014; Hess, 2010; Andrijasevic and Walters, 2010). It is thus indispensable to concern oneself with the ethical implications and possible reverberations of studying migrations. Although it becomes increasingly difficult to predict what precisely does or does not constitute ‘policy relevant’ scholarship, acknowledging the political nature of migration research and the possibility of its ab/use, may be a first step to render it less co-optable. This book proposes to take a step further, to not merely be conscious about one’s positionality, intentions, and the implications of research output, but to become actively involved, to, indeed, become of the struggle. In the contemporary condition of devastating social injustice and inequality, where according to Étienne Balibar (2004: 113, emphasis in original), segregationist population governance manifests a form of ‘global apartheid’, those who write about migration are, as Nicholas De Genova (2013a: 252) suggests, necessarily ‘“of the connections” between migrants’ transnational mobilities and the political, legal, and border-policing regimes that seek to orchestrate, regiment, and manage their energies’. In the absence of a notion of scholarly neutrality, I would suggest that those who conduct research are also ‘of the struggles’. Underlying both my activism and writing is a political commitment shared with migrant resistances.

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Advocating for a shared commitment with those most directly affected and subjugated does not translate into assumptions of (ideological) commonality, or an uncritical engagement with their practices and ideas. Assumed commonality carries with it the danger of ignoring existing differences and privileges that condition and saturate encounters with those who face different intensities of racialised, gendered, class- and citizenship-related violence. Rather, a shared commitment is formed in the acknowledgement that there is no ‘outside’ to the debate, and that what is required is a practical and theoretical opposition to repressive border practices and knowledges that render some individuals, groups, and populations disproportionately exposed to precarisation, exploitation, and lethal violence. Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli (2013a: 303) rightly warn that even ‘critical’ scholarship may ‘be reabsorbed by the “deportation regime”’. They suggest, besides an awareness of the politics of knowledge production, taking a stance – ‘research militancy’. For them (2013b: 247), such research posture is principled on the desire ‘to scrutinize and counteract the paradigm of an all-encompassing governance of mobility and to unpack the fantasies this paradigm entails and engenders’. Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller (2013: 294, emphasis in original; see also Heller, Pezzani and Stierl, 2017, 2019), who have radically reshaped the

Image 1.1 Demonstration against the Hotspot on Lesvos Island, Mytilene/Greece, March 2017 Source: Marily Stroux

Resistance as method 21 ways in which scholar–activists practically intrude in knowledge productions ‘on migration’, propose exercising what they refer to as a disobedient gaze, which aims not to disclose what the regime of migration management attempts to unveil – clandestine migration: but unveil that which it attempts to hide – the political violence it is founded on and the human rights violations that are its structural outcome. Following migrant resistances through ethnographic and activist engagement does not render them mere instrumental analytics to scholarly explore the EUropean border regime. Their disobedient gaze and practice, which this book seeks to amplify, constitute and help ‘localize and consolidate the possibility for ruptures’ (Mezzadra in Garelli and Tazzioli, 2013c). What is intended in the pages that follow is, first, to visibilise and make audible the violence that underpins contemporary forms of migration governance and, second, to locate ways to counteract such violence and its processes of ‘othering’ through which divisions are erected or reinforced between those who are and are not conceived as ‘rightfully’ belonging.

Situating migrant resistance: three interventions Over the past several years, a growing body of scholarship, bridging various disciplines, has demonstrated the willingness to critically engage with migration and contemporary borders, contesting state-centric gazes and methodological nationalisms, even methodological continentalisms (Hansen and Jonsson, 2017) that have long informed the social sciences. By de-centering the sovereign state as the main unit of analysis and opposing theorisations that presume, engender, and reinforce static and reductive conceptions of borders, migration, and citizenship, a range of scholars and activists have opened up spaces to explore the volatility and contestability of these interconnected phenomena. They have taken up the challenge to ‘overturn the false simplicity of some obvious notions’ (Balibar, 2002: 76), and have begun to ask how and by whom, in our contemporary condition, inclusions and exclusions become performed, experienced, and contested, and what alternative, less violent, less exclusionary futures there might be. Among them are three approaches I highlight here: Critical Border Studies (CBS), the Autonomy of Migration (AoM), and Critical Citizenship Studies (CCS). As major scholarly interventions, they have come to contest traditional theories, discourses, and methodologies that have dominated social science disciplines in general and migration and refugee studies in particular. Opposing static theorisations of human mobility, they show that questions over migration, borders, and citizenship are closely connected to questions of power, control, governmentality, and sovereignty, as well as agency, subjectivity, and freedom. Without a doubt, the junctures where these three burgeoning bodies of work meet are fluid and fuzzy, and several scholars could be situated amongst the conceptual spectrum they

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offer, so that their very designation as distinct approaches may be questionable. Nonetheless, as I seek to show, their interrelatedness does not erase important differences between them. By bringing them into conversation around questions of migrant resistance, productive insights as well as tensions, silences, and shortcomings emerge. Instead of attempting to give an adequate overview of these extensive and internally diverse literatures, I point to some major contributions and focus on the ways in which they allow space, theoretical nuance, and methodological resources to better understand the significance and disruptive potential of migration struggles. While I situate my work within these approaches, I suggest that questions of migrant resistance have not been adequately addressed in any of them. In CBS, the question of resistance to forms of border governance and increasingly diffuse border enforcements often remains an afterthought. The AoM is underpinned by a very specific, and at times limiting, account of resistance, located in the supposed (ontological) primacy of migration. CCS binds its discussion of migration struggle a priori to citizenship, which raises the question whether it is able to capture migrant resistances that do not confine themselves to the idiom of citizenship. By bringing these literatures into conversation, as I do throughout the book, they can be thought, to some degree, as each other’s correctives, filling conceptual gaps and oversights, complicating underlying assumptions, and highlighting several points of convergence. Critical Border Studies Developing into an extensive scholarly field, and spanning various academic disciplines, Critical Border Studies has moved away from conceptions of borders as fixed physical entities that, as ‘points of reference’, would designate exclusive spheres of sovereign authority, governance, and ownership, or signal the beginning of a supposedly ‘anarchic beyond’. Instead of accepting borders as natural, neutral, or static formations, CBS scholars have begun to rethink and deconstruct them, their appearances, meanings, and functions (Wilson and Donnan, 2012; Walker, 1993). Advocating to shift the study of borders from static to more dynamic approaches in order to leave behind ‘the epistemological, ontological, and methodological shackles of an ultra-modernistic, “territorialist” Western geopolitical imagination’, Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2009: 586, 2012: 729, emphasis in original) suggest the adoption of ‘the lens of performance through which bordering practices are produced and reproduced’. For them, conceiving borders as performances contests and displaces the state as sole arbiter of, and simply framed by, territorial markers, avoids falling into the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1993), and moves attention to the many actors involved in enacting them. Similarly, for Chris Rumford, borders are made and unmade in processes of ‘bordering’, in which a myriad of actors partake, so that borders should be conceived

Resistance as method 23 as ‘the routine business of all concerned’ (2006: 155). For him, (even) ‘ordinary people (citizens, non-citizens) are increasingly active in constructing, shifting, or even erasing borders’, involved in what he terms ‘borderwork’ (Rumford, 2006: 164, also 2012). Balibar’s (2002: 84) proclamation that borders would no longer be ‘at the border’ does not suggest that they are disappearing. Rather, as mobile, displaced, and everyday forces, they materialise ‘wherever selective controls are to be found’ (Balibar, 2002: 84). He maintains (2004: 109–110, emphasis in original) that as borders become ‘transported into the middle of political space [. . .], they generate conflicts, hopes, and frustrations for all sorts of people, as well as inextricable administrative and ideological difficulties for states’. Various CBS scholars have pointed to the process of spatial and temporal border-displacement, the ‘“explosion” and “implosion” of controls’, as Vicki Squire (2011: 2) puts it, evident in processes of outsourcing, offshoring, externalising, diffusing, or digitalising (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Andersson, 2014; Frowd, 2014; Salter, 2012; Bialasiewicz, 2012; Walters, 2006; Parker and Brassett, 2005; Geiger and Pécoud, 2010; Mountz, 2004; Vaughan-Williams, 2009a). Louise Amoore (2006: 338) in particular emphasises how the biometric border has become ‘the portable border par excellence’ in the turn towards ‘scientific’ migration management, ‘carried by mobile bodies at the very same time as it is deployed to divide bodies at international boundaries, airports, railway stations, on subways or city streets’. Not least due to their diffusion, borders become imbued with multiple meanings – they never have the same meaning for everyone (Soguk, 2007). As polysemic sites, they mean ‘different experiences of the law, the civil administration, the police and elementary rights’ for different individuals and groups of people, not merely in terms of social class as Balibar (2002: 81) notes, but also along racialised and gendered lines. At the same time, borders form symbols, markers of identity, and are instruments of socialisation, often woven into dominant identity narratives that allude to supposedly ‘common experiences, history and memories’ vis-à-vis an ‘other’ (Paasi, 1998: 75). Portraying what and who lie beyond the (usually traditionally imagined) border as dangerous and mysterious fulfils a political function: ‘knowing the other outside, it is possible to affirm identity inside [. . .] knowing identities inside, it is possible to imagine the absences outside’ (Walker, 1991: 456). Balibar (2002: 92, emphases in original) points to the need to employ alternative spatial imaginaries in coming to terms with the ways in which borders ‘are being thinned out and doubled, becoming borders zones, regions, or countries where one can reside and live’. EUrope has become of particular interest to many CBS scholars, prompting conceptualisations of its spatial configurations as a ‘borderzone’, ‘borderland’, or ‘borderscape’ (Karakayalı and Rigo, 2010; Balibar, 2009; Rumford, 2008a and 2008b; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2007). The gradual dismantling of EUrope’s internal borders and the growing communalisation of immigration controls has drawn attention to the various (re-)bordering

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processes (Boswell, 2003; Walters and Haahr, 2005). In the EUropean harmonisation process, especially since the Amsterdam Treaty of 1999, both territorial controls over the common external borders and ‘deterritorialised control around the individual and the free movement of persons’ have become reinforced (Bigo, Carrera, Guild and Walker, 2007: 18). Following the Treaty of Lisbon, Article 77 (1) of the ‘consolidated version of the Treaty on European Union, 2010’ envisions the development of a union policy to ‘[carry] out checks on persons and efficient monitoring of the crossing of external borders’ and to gradually introduce ‘an integrated management system for external borders’ while ‘ensuring the absence of any controls on persons, whatever their nationality, when crossing internal borders’ (European Union, 2010). Requiring alternative frameworks to make sense of these novel border configurations, notions such as border system, regime, machine, apparatus, or assemblage have been deployed (Cuttitta, 2012; De Genova and Peutz, 2010). Inspired in particular by Foucault and his work on the ‘art of government’, CBS scholars have increasingly conceived EUrope’s political authority as based on entangled, relational, and networked ‘petty sovereigns’ (Butler, 2004: 56). Instead of constituting a hierarchical system, the thicket of EUropean border and migration governance, conceived as a regime in this book, involves a myriad of actors, systems, and rationales, signalling a transformation of traditional nation-state logics of sovereignty, authority, and space. For example, William Walters (2002: 563), when analysing ‘Schengenland’, conceptualises its geopolitical formation as an assemblage, consisting of heterogeneous elements, including not only ‘a police and military system, but cartographic, diplomatic, legal, geological, and geographical knowledges and practices’. Similarly, Luiza Bialasiewicz (2011: 299) speaks of a ‘fluid assemblage of agreements and actors’ through which EUrope conducts the government of mobility ‘with considerable slippage between the bordering practices of Member States and what is done “on behalf” of the Union’. Relatedly, Gregory Feldman (2012) refers to a migration management ‘apparatus’ that operates without a central authority but through indirect or ‘non-local’ (bureaucratic) relations. CBS scholarship has thus complicated our understanding of borders. Responding to Balibar’s (2002: 76) call to problematise borders, despite the ‘danger of going round in circles, as the very representation of the border is the precondition for any definition’, CBS scholars probe their heterogeneous materialisations, the plurality of functions they serve at different times and in different places, their identity-generating capacities, and their (violent) effects for certain individuals, groups, and populations. This book seeks to add to the study of borders by exploring their characteristics and proliferation through practices of contestation. It, at the same time, cautions that understanding borders as contingent, ambiguous, and dynamic everyday-phenomena that can potentially re-materialise ‘at any moment’, ‘everywhere’, and be enacted by ‘anyone’ entails some risks. Two points in particular need to be stressed. First, conceptions of an increasingly vacillating border

Resistance as method 25 at times under-acknowledge the ways in which (even) governmental borders require abject forms of exclusionary and often necropolitical violence that affect only certain individuals, groups, and populations particularly harshly, informed by racialised and (neo-)colonial registers of who count as ‘livable’ or ‘expendable’ lives (Mbembe, 2003). Often conceived as a post-sovereign system of evasive governmental control, underpinned by the biopolitical rationale to exert ‘a positive influence on life’ (Foucault, 1998: 137), the fact that border regimes depend on repressive force remains, at times, under-explored. For Corey Johnson and Reece Jones (2011: 61, also Jones and Johnson, 2014), while welcoming the attention paid to dispersing borders, the ‘expansive understanding of borders [. . .] has also obscured what a border is’, and Alison Mountz (2011: 65) calls for ‘creative ways of mapping borders’ since they have ‘not simply been relocated everywhere’ but become ‘reconstituted with enforcement methods in strategic locations’. Analyses of border displacement require a lens which allows to do both, trace their rematerialisation on a micro-physical level and reveal patterns of structural forms of violence underpinning globalising forms of segregation. Proposing migrant resistance as method is this book’s attempt to do precisely that. Second, and related, CBS scholarship often under-acknowledges forms of rupture and resistance. Rather a question of emphasis, not omission, this body of scholarship has displayed a tendency to over-acknowledge the governmentalisation of borders, and therefore their efficacy and ‘success’, while under-exploring forces of resistance. While attending to the EUropean border regime, machine, apparatus, or assemblage, there has been less consideration afforded to (counter-) forces of migrant resistance. Analysing how the border re-materialises ‘everywhere’ and potentially subjugates ‘everyone’ to border policing may efface the manifold ways in which borders are continuously being resisted, reshaped, and at times undone. If notions inspired by Foucault are employed, it feels important to also acknowledge how, for him, resistant practices can form crucial forces of friction. Not only probing the instability and vulnerability of governmental regimes, they, as constitutive forces, also appropriate and shape systems of governance. The Autonomy of Migration In contrast to CBS, the Autonomy of Migration literature has engaged deeply with the politics and struggles of unauthorised migration. Emerging from academic and political traditions associated with ‘Autonomist Marxism’, it attunes to the autonomy of migration, understood as the primacy of (migratory) mobility over (border) control (Ataç, Rygiel and Stierl, 2016). As an attempt to abandon dominant conceptions of migration as mere passive reactions to economic or social pressures, and as objectifiable processes responding to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, the AoM understands migration as a complex and dynamic social force, and its subjects as those whose mobilities often escape attempts to regulate, capture, and deter them.

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Though often imagined as a ‘water-tap’, migration, as Manuela Bojadžijev and Serhat Karakayalı (2007) argue, cannot be turned on or off according to economic needs for (exploitable) labour. Yann Moulier Boutang (1992, my translation, also 2007) was amongst the first to suggest that, despite ‘myriads of experts and officials’ in state administrations and international organisations, forces of emigration and immigration would surpass attempts to regulate them. Notwithstanding forms of repression seeking to counteract and order them, ultimately, it would be impossible to fully tame them. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 213) seem to capture an underlying sentiment of the AoM when they write: A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration. All the powers of the old world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but the movement is irresistible. [. . .] The legal and documented movements are dwarfed by clandestine migrations: the borders of national sovereignty are sieves. Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos (2008: 202) in particular advance the idea of migration as a spectre, as a creative and mostly imperceptible force that escapes and subverts forms of control: migration is autonomous, meaning that – against a long history of social control over mobility as well as a similarly oppressive research in the field of migration studies – migration has been and continues to be a constituent force in the formation of sovereignty. Engaging with the autonomy of migration is primarily a matter of acquiring a different sensibility. For them, this sensibility allows to focus on the many forms of subversion that occur when people move, and they do move, regardless of forces of control. They constitute ‘escape’ which is ‘primarily imperceptible’ and differs from ‘escape from’ as it is ‘only after control tries to recapture escape routes [that we can] speak of ‘escape from’ (Papadopolous, Stephenson & Tsianos: xiii, emphasis in original). Escape routes, then, are those paths that are ‘made’ by people on the move. Migration, the AoM suggests, does not adhere to traditional conceptions of the political to be political. For Mitropoulos (2007: 131), ‘the Left’ tends to ignore the politics of migration in order to ‘[reserve] for itself the semblance and definition of political struggle, movement, and representation’, thereby, however, recreating ‘the structure of the sovereign decision’. Important also for this book’s conceptualisations of migrant resistance, she (2007: 132) suggests that the AoM forms ‘an insistence that politics does not need to be the property of the state and those who [. . .] can claim to reserve for themselves the thought and action that is deemed to be properly political’. For Mitropoulos (2007: 132), the AoM constitutes ‘a challenge to the sovereign and representational disposition within what passes for the

Resistance as method 27 Left, to the very construction of what it means to be an activist, to do politics, and to recognise movements and struggles as such’. At the same time, the AoM has provoked critique, in particular with regards to what I would characterise as its ascription of ontological primacy to mobility and the interpretation of ‘control’ as a re-active force, leading to concerns about romanticising tendencies and the under-acknowledging of precarious migration’s diverse, gendered, and asymmetrical dimensions (Scheel, 2013; Sharma, 2009; Benz and Schwenken, 2005). Migration understood as a positively autonomous force that comes prior to forces of control conflicts with a Foucauldian understanding of power and resistance as entangled, even co-constitutive forces, an understanding on which this book’s development of migrant resistance rests. Mezzadra (2010a, my translation) argues that ‘we were not really successful in creating a satisfactory theoretical framework that allows to present “the Autonomy of Migration” as an approach that does not lead to a romantisation of migration’. He (2010a, my translation) criticises the tendency to counteract a negative depiction of migrants as exploited subjects with an image of migrants as the ‘cultural avant-garde of the present’ and suggests that what he terms the ‘ambivalence of migratory practices’ should become of central concern. Mezzadra’s writing and in particular his work with Brett Neilson in Border as Method (2013), which could be equally situated in CBS, have addressed some of the critique levied against the AoM. They propose a nuanced account of how people on the move, as well as those who seek to stay where they are, find themselves entangled in proliferating (neoliberal) borders, showing that a reductive understanding of ‘control’ based upon a hierarchical, negative, and reactionary understanding of power fails to account for its productive dimensions. Though the idea of resistance as method was first conceived before the publication of their seminal work, its fleshing out in this book has benefited significantly from their body of work and the insight that ‘only from the subjective viewpoint of border crossings and struggles can the temporal thickness and heterogeneity of the border be discerned’ (2013: 166). Bringing CBS and CCS scholarship into AoM-informed analyses, as Mezzadra and Neilson do, can thus be seen as a corrective to some of the noted shortcomings: given CBS’ account of how the EUropean border regime entangles its subjects, the question is raised whether it is desirable to reduce resistant possibilities to an ostensible primary autonomy, and CCS’ close engagement with migrant mobilisations, including rights-based ones, allows us to conceive of migrant resistance more broadly, beyond imperceptibility and, though not without tensions, possibly even within the frame of citizenship. Critical Citizenship Studies Critical Citizenship Studies’ intervention has prompted a diverse and empirically informed body of scholarship that, similar to the AoM, contests victimising portrayals of those residing outside of ‘formal’ citizenship. With its emphasis on

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how subjects claim and enact their political belonging, even when socially marginalised or illegalised, it offers conceptual tools to examine the ways in which citizenship can be appropriated for a, at times, radical politics. Closely associated with the work of Engin Isin (2002), CCS emerged in the 1990s as a distinctive field of scholarly investigation into and theorisation of citizenship, responding to processes of ‘“postmodernization” and “globalization”’ that entailed a plurality of reconfigurations of national belonging, amongst others ‘new rationalities of government, new regimes of accumulation of different forms of capital, as well as new social movements and their struggles for recognition and redistribution’ (Isin and Turner, 2002: 1). Within these processes, the traditional idea of citizenship as the mere holding of formal legal status in a nation-state became challenged and broadened, which led CCS scholarship to attach more and more adjectives to the notion of citizenship: ‘ecological, global, cosmopolitan, lived, intimate, sexual, postcolonial, multicultural, transnational’, and so forth (Nyers, 2007: 1). The process of widening citizenship resembles the process of complicating the supposedly ‘obvious notions’ of borders and migration in CBS and AoM respectively. Also in CCS, EUropean processes of communalisation, integration, and enlargement stimulated conceptual advancement. While some expected the dawn of ‘a postnational development occurring in a Europe “without frontiers”’, as Gerard Delanty (2007: 63) notes, these sentiments were exaggerated. EU citizenship remains bound to the nation-state since only national passport holders become automatically also EU citizens. And still, for Delanty (2007: 67), EUropeanisation has prompted a ‘loosening of the tie between citizenship and nationality’, granting EUropean citizens the ability to move rather freely in the union and to vote for or stand as candidates in EU parliamentary elections. Though also stimulated by these reconfigurations of citizenship from the top down, CCS has paid attention in particular to struggles at the margins, from where those without formal citizenship claimed citizenship, as Isin (2008: 39) outlined in his now popular concept of ‘acts of citizenship’: We define acts of citizenship as those acts that transform forms (orientations, strategies, technologies) and modes (citizens, strangers, outsiders, aliens) of being political by bringing into being new actors as activist citizens (claimants of rights and responsibilities) through creating new sites and scales of struggle. Isin proposed this concept to develop an understanding of citizenship based upon claims to belonging. Enquring into what these claims do, namely enabling political subjectivity, Isin, Peter Nyers, and Bryan Turner (2009: 1) have referred to narrow definitions of citizenship as ‘a serious intellectual mistake because we (almost) all know that citizenship is a contested site of social struggles’. For Nyers (2010: 141), formal citizenship status is not a precondition to be political, since, through acts of

Resistance as method 29 citizenship, ‘non-status groups [. . .] extract themselves from the hegemonic categories by which political identity is normally understood’. By conjoining citizenship with seemingly incommensurable notions, including ‘abject’, ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘irregular’, or ‘accidental’, he has repeatedly enquired into citizenship’s limits, ambiguities, and contestations, showing how supposedly precarious or voiceless subjects ‘assert themselves as political by publicly making claims about rights and membership, freedom and equality’ (2010: 128, also 2011, 2006, 2003). The work of Kim Rygiel and Anne McNevin in particular, but of course also many others, has crucially advanced CCS, built bridges to the AoM, and could also be associated with CBS. Rygiel has theorised biopolitical citizenship as government, demonstrating how processes of neoliberal globalisation have led to border-transgressing capital flows without rendering citizenship, and borders, insignificant. For her, quite the opposite is the case: ‘citizenship as a form of governing has been strengthened through innovative strategies and technologies of power, becoming an increasingly effective way of controlling populations in a globalizing environment’ (2010: 6). Contesting the process through which ‘citizenship is becoming a globalizing regime governing global mobility’ (2010: 10, also 2011), Rygiel stresses how different forms of migrant and solidarity activism offer alternative modalities of what citizenship might mean or could become. McNevin (2011: 2) has also pointed to the effects of hegemonic forms of globalisation in disrupting ‘the territorial frame according to which citizenship has traditionally been shaped’. For her (2011: 2, emphasis in original), the struggles of those who can be conceived as ‘immanent outsiders’, thus irregularised migrants, ‘for legitimate presence and political equality are contestations of citizenship that both undermine and reinscribe the conventional form of citizenship and the state’s power to enforce it’. Criticising some AoM-informed scholarship for ignoring rights-based political demands and for reading sovereign power reductively and narrowly, McNevin (2013) has taken up the notion of ‘ambivalence’ to explore the transformative political potential of migrant claims for citizenship at the inside-outside junctures of sovereign order. CCS has prompted alternative ways of envisioning citizenship, as both a site of subjugation and emancipatory struggle. It is also due to its intervention that we can conceive of struggles for citizenship rights as significant though ambivalent political moments, displacing (formal) citizen–subjects as the sole agents of social transformation. However, especially scholars associated with the AoM perspective have criticised CCS for its attempt to widen or complicate citizenship. For Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013: 179), doing so would ultimately be a flawed endeavour: ‘whatever the definition of citizenship is, it operates as a wall when it represents the ultimate horizon of political practice and social analysis’. Mezzadra (2015: 133), though more appreciative of CCS scholarship, also sees the risk that a widened understanding of citizenship might ‘obscure the restrictive and even despotic tendencies crisscrossing the evolution of citizenship today in many parts

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of the world as well as the link between these tendencies and the global as well as local operations of capital’. For him (2015: 134), instead of stretching the concept of citizenship, ‘we need to “deemphasize” the focus on citizenship that characterizes many mainstream as well as critical migration studies today’. Seeking to navigate between CCS and the AoM, where at times caricatural portrayals of each other’s approach have led to a growing divide, Nyers (2015) has offered the notion of ‘migrant citizenships’. While granting that citizenship’s ‘exclusionary force is there by design [. . .], immanent to its logic [. . .] and meant to produce successful and unsuccessful subjects’ (2015: 31), citizenship could not simply be equated with sovereignty. He (2015: 32, 34) suggests that citizenship has never been fully ‘captured by the state’ and asks for a nuanced understanding of ‘how citizenship is simultaneously a means of governance and exclusionary rule, and also an important identity through which progressive struggles get enacted and performed’. Despite the tensions between CCS and the AoM, they both offer significant conceptual insights to come to terms with the complexity of the politics of unauthorised migration and its control. While this book’s principle intention is certainly not to harmonise these bodies of scholarship, I hope it will offer some resources to rethink aspects that are routinely understood at odds with one another, at times to an extent that some feel compelled to ‘pick sides’, especially when the different conceptual positions are portrayed as antagonistic or mutually exclusive. Despite their differences, what they have in common, and I would include CBS here, is that they cannot be accused of ‘taking policy categories as a starting point for research’ – a charge Mezzadra (2015: 121) has rightly levied against mainstream migration studies. Moreover, in their own ways, they have overturned the false simplicity of the seemingly ‘obvious notions’ of migration, borders, and citizenship and have sought to forge ‘a new conceptual nomenclature’ (Mezzadra, 2015: 134). What they also seem to share is ‘a strong normative concern with reimagining political life from the margins, particularly in relation to those inhabiting mobile and precarious lives’, as Carolina Moulin and Diana Thomaz (2016: 599) have noted. Without projecting too much, the three approaches seem to agree that, as Paolo Novak (2017: 858) puts it: The analytically unmediated sense of injustice, and rage, felt by watching daily news about shipwrecks, lorries, jungles, fences, racism, humanitarian and military armies, war, law and the economy, can and should be harnessed towards the definition of progressive political claims and struggles. In this book, I conceive of AoM’s emphasis on rather imperceptible border subversions and CCS’ emphasis on the enactment of claims to citizenship as ways to come to terms with facets of migrant resistance. The different struggles that I explore as method in this book show that resistances come in manifold expressions, as forces that publicly demand citizenship rights or halt deportations and

Resistance as method 31 as those that enact a politics of escape by seeking to remain rather hidden and imperceptible. When we attempt to begin critical interrogations with migrant mobilisations, and in order to grasp their ‘border thinking’ (Mignolo, 2000), we need to acknowledge, from the very beginning, that there can be no pure ‘outside’ from where to conceptualise migrant resistance. Their situatedness at borders means that those struggling cannot but be tainted and impinged upon by proliferating forces of control, and thus be inevitably entangled in hegemonic power relations. While this does not have to put in doubt disruptive and transformative potentialities, even in the bleakest of spaces and situations, it has important implications for conceptualisations of resistance. Acts of migrant resistance are expressions of global injustice, the (not always intended) consequence of rampant and exploitative processes of neoliberal globalisation and circulating capital that know no bounds but instead often function in symbiosis with sovereign borders that regulate, filter, and deter in the name of nationalism, the status quo, economic prosperity, or (white) supremacy. Unauthorised migrations, as the literatures of CBS, the AoM, and CCS show, are more than simply causal effects, thrown around by global capital as exploitable labour or chased away by warlords. Always composed of individuals with diverse histories, reasons, needs, desires, resources, and abilities, the dichotomous ascriptions of ‘voluntariness’ or ‘force’ to their movements and their often arbitrary categorisation into ‘economic migrant’, ‘asylum seeker’, or ‘refugee’, can never do justice to their lived experience and political subjecthood. Migrant resistance, I argue, as an embodied practice, can emerge and be performed in various ways and guises. It is enacted not simply in opposition to what is considered Power as (state) domination but also on a micro-physical level, in everyday social interactions that connect, nevertheless, to a transversal beyond. By tracing micro-but-transversal practices of migrant resistance and all that they catalyse, we can pay attention to a range of modalities of struggles and their reverberations. As an approach to political and radical analysis, I view resistance as method as beginning with migration struggles to explore, through them, contemporary forms of EUropean border governance that are inscribed in, and continuously perpetuating, forms of global segregation.

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‘When our bodies become our weapons. Today is the 7th day of our general hunger strike and [at] the same time it is the 4th day of our dry hunger strike. [. . .] This is our last message’ (Non-Citizens, 2013a).1 On the 28th of June 2013, more than fifty migrant protesters on Munich’s streets announced that the time for ‘political games’ had run out. Either the German government granted political asylum to all of them or they would die of starvation, just like ‘Bobby Sands and Holger Meins’ had done in confinement in Northern Ireland and Germany, decades earlier. Many collapsed, some were brought to hospitals, only to return to the tent camp erected on the occupied square and continue their protest. Dry hunger strikes, the refusal of both food and water, can prompt irreversible health damages, if not worse. Without water, humans can survive only a few days. When the hunger strikers were at the brink of death, after last-minute negotiations between them and a special delegation of senior politicians had failed, the police raided the camp in the early hours of Sunday, the 30th of June, arrested a number of strikers and supporters, and demolished the camp. No one died but dozens of protesters required medical care and were brought to hospitals in the region. Others were imprisoned. Forced into a state of social marginality, the migrant strikers had to nonetheless survive, their self-sacrificial death was disallowed, officially on humanitarian grounds. This first case of my multi-sited ethnography follows the migrant mobilisations that emerged in 2012 and would help to catalyse a ‘new era of protest’ in Germany and beyond, sparking attention and debate on hitherto unknown scale (Ataç, Kron, Schilliger, Schwiertz and Stierl, 2015). From the outset, the migrant protesters displayed the will to openly disagree with and challenge the laws, practitioners, and discourses deemed responsible for their subjugation. They sought public attention and forcefully claimed recognition and rights from (state) authorities in order to escape what they conceived as the condition of ‘non-citizenship’. Underpinned by an antagonistic attitude, their practices and repertoires of resistance were determined, resolute, and controversial. In a word, they were dissensual: months-long occupations of city streets, squares and buildings, numerous strikes, demonstrations, marches and intrusions into detention centres, the conscious defiance of residence laws, clashes with police forces and political authorities, practices of

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self-harm, lip-sewing and hunger striking, threats of suicide and martyrdom. The discursive interventions of the migrant protestors were no less provocative, marking a rigid division between citizenship and non-citizenship, and (yet) demanding inclusion into the body of the citizenry. Some of them claimed a new name, opting, after the first year of struggle, for ‘Non-Citizen’ rather than ‘refugee’ or ‘asylumseeker’. Through their practices of dissent and their uncompromising narratives, they sought to provoke collisions, not only with the hegemonic order or class, conceivable following Antonio Gramsci (1971) as the economically and politically dominant bourgeois forces in society (see also Buckel, 2013), but also within the scene of solidarity and migrant activism itself. Their words and deeds caused controversies, effecting debate, disappointment, and condemnation. Their resistance relentlessly created confrontations between what they perceived as the worlds of citizenship and non-citizenship, and between subjects thought to inhabit the former and the latter. These confrontations functioned all the more vigorously, the more dichotomous and incommensurable these worlds were made out to be, even if at the cost of reducing complexity and creating new and rigid lines. In this chapter I do not offer an exhaustive or chronological account of a cycle of migrant protests that underwent various reorientations and transformations as well as painful setbacks. Rather, I focus on significant moments, discourses, and practices by listening to the protagonists of struggle and by attentively following their acts and conceptualisations of resistance. Several of my initial observations were informed by tracing the emerging protest virtually. This was due to issues of time, resources, and my discomfort about possibly engaging in forms of activist-research tourism or participating in ‘a spectacle of proximity’ (Garelli and Tazzioli, 2013a: 302). Garelli and Tazzioli (2013a: 302, emphasis in original) have importantly cautioned against what they refer to as the ‘staging of “being there” of researcher activists and the spectacle of their breaking through a “distance”, the enactment at locality of their closeness to the struggle(-site)’. I witnessed at first from afar how the movement unfolded in Germany in early 2012. Over the following months and years, I visited sites of struggle in Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Brussels, encountering several activists and supporters there, and continuing some discussions afterwards via email. Through my efforts as reviewer and translator of several of their public statements and press releases, as interpreter at the NonCitizen Congress in March 2013 in Munich, and as organiser of small solidarity actions in Athens and London, as well as of a workshop in Munich in March 2014 involving Non-Citizen activists and activists from several other migrant movements (Struggles Collective, 2015), I sought to stay involved, supportive, and somewhat useful while, at the same time, maintaining a reflexive distance. This chapter begins by briefly recounting the emergence of the migrant protests in Germany in 2012, before turning in the second part to Rancière’s (2010) elaboration on dissent. In three sub-sections – ‘Wrong/ing names’, ‘Wrong/ing spaces’, and ‘Wrong behaviour’ – I explore particularly confrontational migrant activist

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practices of resistance. In the third part, I wonder whether we can understand a dissensual politics whose protagonists strive towards incorporation into the body of citizenship as, nonetheless, enacting a radical politics that counters the rationale and violence of the sovereign order, possibly able to produce something new, beyond the confines of such order.

Formation On the 28th of January 2012, Mohammad Rahsepar locked himself into his room in the communal accommodation for asylum-seekers in Würzburg, South-Germany. Having suffered from depression in the centre following his escape from Iran in 2011 where he had been tortured by the regime, he ended his life at the age of 29. Rahsepar left behind wife and child, who had not been able to follow him to Germany from Iran. His death could have gone largely unnoticed, as so many do in EUropean asylum or detention centres (Abu-Hayyeh and Webber, 2015), but fellow residents and friends decided to ‘break the isolation’ and rise up in protest. They regarded Rahsepar’s death as a direct consequence of his subjugation to an asylum-seeker life in Germany. A group of male Iranian asylum-seekers began to demonstrate in front of the town hall of Würzburg and later, in March 2012, they launched the ‘Refugee Tent Action’ (Non-Citizens, 2012a). In a tent, erected in the centre of the town, they went on their first hunger strike and voiced several demands. They called for the rapid processing of all asylum applications, the right to work, access to German language courses and freely chosen medical care, the possibility of family reunification, as well as the abolition of communal accommodations, allocated food packages, and the residential law (Residenzpflicht). Unique in EUrope, the residential law immobilises asylum-seekers’ freedom to move within Germany by requiring them to stay within strict boundaries, defined by the ‘local office for foreigners’ (Ausländerbehörde). After eighty days of protest, some of the strikers sewed together their lips and wrote: ‘We are the voices of all asylum-seekers who demand their rights. We have screamed loudly but nobody has listened. Now we have sewn our lips together because everything has been said’ (Non-Citizens, 2012b).2 In a statement entitled ‘Why we practice resistance’, published in August 2012, they expressed what seemed to have turned into their four central demands: 1) The recognition of all asylum-seekers as political refugees; 2) The halting of all deportations; 3) The abolition of the residency-law; 4) The abolition of the duty to remain in communal accommodations (‘Lagerpflicht’) which denies the asylum-seeker the ability to choose his or her place of residence. (Non-Citizens, 2012c)3 Their protest spread. Especially over the summer of 2012, more and more protest tent camps emerged in other Southern German towns. After months of hardship

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and repeated hunger strikes, migrant protesters from several German regions came together in Frankfurt as the ‘coordination committee of protesting asylum-seekers’, composed of one representative from each tent camp, to strategise about future collective actions. There, the decision was made to coordinate a joint protest among different asylum-seeker communities across Germany, starting on the 8th of September 2012: On this day asylum seekers will move towards Berlin from 2 different routes and after gathering in this city they will show to the German government that any action towards implementation of the inhumane deportation law will be responded back by the asylum seekers’ movement and will not remain unopposed. They will shout louder than ever that they will continue their struggle until the asylum seekers’ camps with their catastrophic conditions are abolished. In fact, by gathering in Berlin, the asylum seekers will actively disobey the discriminatory law of limited travelling range [residential law], which forces the asylum seekers to remain within a certain area. [. . .] To all asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants in Germany: we have all left our countries for different reasons, and we all came to this country hoping for a better and safer life. Most of us have come from thousands of kilometres away to this place, going through all sorts of agony, danger and suffering to get here. We have tolerated all the hardship hoping for a better life in future. It is perhaps now the time to wear the same shoes we were wearing when we crossed all the borders on the way to here, it is perhaps now the time to travel for some more tens of kilometres ahead, this time not alone but all together towards creating a better world. (Non-Citizens, 2012c) The ‘Refugee March’ took off in Southern Germany as planned, and when the first local state border was reached, residence permits were ripped apart and posted to the Ministry for Migration and Refugees. In defiance of the residential law, the march continued across German state lines. Breaking this law can entail heavy fines, arrest, or imprisonment up to one year. Throughout Germany, the struggle gained momentum, grew in size, mobilised protesters from different ‘countries of origin’, and received wide media coverage as well as avowals of solidarity from diverse civil society actors and activist networks. After twenty-eight days on the road, sleeping in ‘tent cities’, visiting and protesting isolated accommodation centres for asylum-seekers to spread their message, and covering 650 kilometres afoot, migrant and solidarity activists arrived in Berlin. Their march had coincided with the ‘Refugee Bus Tour’ that visited dozens of accommodation centres, aiming to mobilise their residents. As migrant activist Napuli Langa (2015) recalled: ‘We were able to expose the isolation of refugees, and we invited them to leave their [. . .] camps to join our bus tour and the march to Kreuzberg in Berlin’. Arriving jointly in the German capital, participants of the march and the bus tour erected a common

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tent camp at the Oranienplatz, in the heart of Berlin, an occupation that would last until March 2014. Celebrating their arrival, a 6,000 people-strong demonstration was organised in October 2012 by a broad solidarity coalition, forming one of the largest demonstrations in history for the rights of migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees in Germany (Non-Citizens, 2012a). Despite the growing momentum of the struggle, tensions within the movement grew as well. In their main tent camp on the Oranienplatz, where a variety of (migrant) activists had newly joined the occupation, discussions about who got to be part in decision-making processes flared up and prompted conflict. Although the concept of ‘non-citizenship’ was introduced only a few months later, divisions appeared already along the question of who would speak and act for and as the movement. In particular the initial group of strikers insisted on their political independence, differentiating clearly between those with citizenship or recognised refugee status and those whose lack thereof forced them into social marginality. For them, only asylum-seekers, the merely ‘tolerated’ (geduldet), and the undocumented were subjected into the lowest strata of society, even beneath many other marginalised groups, since only they could experience residence laws, detention in camps, and (the fear of) deportation. As a consequence of their conceptualisation of who was the main subject of struggle, even migrant activists who had long been part of migrant and refugee rights movements, some of whom had obtained a (more) protected (residence) status only recently, found themselves on the other, seemingly more privileged side of ‘non-citizenship’, and were thus excluded from certain gatherings and decision-making processes (Jakob, 2016a). Due to these internal tensions in the movement, a range of political actions were carried out by particular factions, the dominant two of which were composed of migrant activists and supporters who maintained the Oranienplatz camp and organised mainly from there and those migrant activists who would later refer to themselves as the Non-Citizens, and who had left the Oranienplatz together with a group of supporters in late October 2012 due to political differences. While the political actions of the Non-Citizen group will be followed the most closely in this chapter, including the hunger strike at the Brandenburg Gate in autumn 2012, the Non-Citizen Congress in March 2013, and the dry hunger strike in June 2013, some actions that emanated from migrant activists at the Oranienplatz will also be discussed, including the occupation of the square itself and the occupation of the Gerhart-Hauptmann school building in December 2012. While, clearly, this cycle of protests in Germany was not free of internal tensions and differences, they collectively produced a form of dynamic, radical, and confrontational migrant activism that had not existed before. Instead of pleading for inclusion by portraying themselves primarily as victims deserving protection or by promising to become ‘good citizens’ and (economically) productive new members of society, they dissensually claimed their right to presence.

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Image 2.1 First day of Non-Citizen hunger strike at Pariser Platz, Berlin/Germany, October 2013 Source: Oliver Feldhaus

Two worlds in one? Searching for conceptual resources to explore the Non-Citizen movement in particular, and migrant practices of dissent more generally, I was drawn to the work of Rancière, in which he had long conceptualised processes of subjectivisation through antagonistic political practice. His explorations of embodied contestations and his attention to collisions between them and the dominant political order have become prominent in theorisations of interventions performed by groups considered marginal in society (Edkins, 2011; Nyers, 2003 and 2010; Aradau and Huysmans, 2009; Schwiertz, 2016). Though not without shortcomings (see Dillon, 2005a), Rancière’s take on dissent adds to a Foucauldian account of resistance. While Foucault (1998: 96) speaks often ephemerally of mobile and transitory instances of resistance, ‘producing cleavages in society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings’, it is Rancière (2010: 69) who focuses more explicitly on how and by whom these cleavages and fractures are produced – for him, in moments of dispute, or what he calls a dissensus: A dissensus is not a conflict of interests, opinions or values; it is a division inserted into ‘common sense’: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given. Repeatedly returning to the revolutionary practices of Olympe de Gouges, a feminist activist during the time of the French Revolution who was executed at the

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guillotine in 1793, Rancière (2010: 68–69, emphasis added) suggests that her famous statement, ‘if women were entitled to go to the scaffold, then they were also entitled to go to the assembly’, set in motion the ‘process of a wrong, in the construction of a dissensus’. While born equal, women were not equal as citizens, and remained unrecognised as political subjects in the hierarchical social order. For Rancière (2010: 37), de Gouges’ political activism intervened into, and thereby ‘wronged’, a seemingly commonsensical reality: They [the revolutionary women] acted as subjects that did not have the rights that they had and that had the rights that they had not. This is what I call a dissensus: the putting of two worlds in one and the same world. The two worlds that the revolutionary women brought into one were the world of consensus, or ‘police’, and the world of dissensus, or ‘politics’. For Rancière (2010: 152, 36), the world of the police, the dominant social order, seeks to exhaust ‘the visible and the sayable’, arranging and ordering political community ‘by difference in birth, and by the different functions, places and interests that make up the social body to the exclusion of every supplement’. He refers to the police as ‘a distribution of the sensible’ (2010: 36, emphasis in original), as the attempt to allocate everything into its ‘right’ place, thereby erasing whatever does not seem to quite fit. A police order is sought to be installed in the name of consensus, which, for Rancière (2010: 42), is not ‘peaceful discussion and reasonable agreement’ as commonly understood, but instead, something oppressive: Its essence lies in the annulment of dissensus as separation of the sensible from itself, [. . .] the nullification of surplus subjects, [. . .] the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body and of the political community to the relations between the interests and aspirations of these different parts. Consensus consists, then, in the reduction of politics to the police. Though often conceived as the realm of ‘politics proper’, Rancière reverses the logic of consensus as a democratic virtue into the opposite, the pending death of politics, and mobilises instead an understanding of politics as dissensus. Acts of dissent disturb the police arrangement by supplementing it ‘with a part of those without part’, thereby ‘[making] visible that which had no reason to be seen’ (2010: 36, 38). The Non-Citizens appear to be those with ‘no part’ in a Rancièrean sense, who engaged in practices essential to politics, namely ‘in the modes of dissensual subjectivation that reveal a society in its difference to itself’ (Rancière, 2010: 42). By leaving their confinement and ‘breaking the isolation’, as a slogan employed throughout their struggle insisted, they seemed to verify ‘the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being’ (Rancière, 1992: 58). This demonstration of political capacity in a radical staging of equality, for Rancière, constitutes a

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moment of emancipation and could also be conceived as a ‘heterological’ act, a process of becoming political in which subjects refuse the ‘right names’ and ‘right places’ assigned to them by the dominant order of the police. Rancière (1992: 62) defines heterology as follows: First, it is never the simple assertion of an identity; it is always, at the same time, the denial of an identity given by an other, given by the ruling order of policy. Policy is about ‘right’ names, names that pin people down to their place and work. Politics is about ‘wrong’ names – misnomers that articulate a gap and connect with a wrong. Second, it is a demonstration, and a demonstration always supposes an other, even if that other refuses evidence or argument [. . .]. Third, the logic of subjectivization always entails an impossible identification. Throughout their struggle, the Non-Citizens experimented with modes of dissensual subjectivisation, attempting to produce conflictual confrontations between seemingly antagonistic worlds, the world of citizenship and non-citizenship. As those who were not expected to speak and be seen in public, un(ac)counted in the dominant consensual order, they asserted their presence and loudly claimed their equality with everyone else. It seems that in these acts of wronging the consensual order, we can locate some of the political potential of the Non-Citizen movement, and more generally, migrant dissent. Their resistance ruptured a commonsensical normality and brought into the equation that which did not seem to previously belong, or, rather, that which was constitutive of the norm but needed to be continuously made to appear to not belong. For Rancière, resistance seems to emerge in brief and rare moments of dissent. A ‘political demonstration’, for him (2010: 39), is ‘always of the moment’. As the following three sections show, however, Non-Citizen practices of resistance were not fleeting public contestations, but enactments of a radical politics that required preparation, organisation, resources, experimenting, and endurance. In hundreds of plenaries, actions were meticulously planned. Likewise, their confrontational discursive intervention developed not over night, but over many months of struggle. Producing short-lived ruptures of the commonsensical norm was not their intention. The members of the Non-Citizen movement did not want to remain those who ceaselessly provoked the dominant ‘police’ order to expose the absence of equality in the moment of staging scenes of emancipation, often at great personal cost. They sought inclusion, recognition, rights, and a protected (residence) status. They wanted to become citizens in order to escape their marginal position in society and to abandon the names ascribed to them, names that subjected them to particular places and tied them to certain – mostly grateful and submissive – forms of expected behaviour. How can we conceive of such migratory dissent that, characterised by uncompromising demands and confrontations with (state) authorities, ultimately strives towards incorporation into the body of citizenship?

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Wrong/ing names After about a year of struggle, in March 2013, the self-designation of ‘NonCitizen’ and the concept of ‘non-citizenship’ were officially presented at the Non-Citizen Congress in Munich with about 300 (migrant) activists attending. In a statement entitled ‘On the position of asylum-seekers and asylum-seekers’ struggles in modern societies’, the following question was raised: ‘who is called an “asylum-seeker” and what position is attributed to the person who carries this title?’ (Non-Citizens, 2013b).4 They explained that ‘dominant capitalist forces’ had ravaged ‘countries of origin’, forcing their inhabitants to migrate and seek entrance to the Global North where they would receive the title of ‘asylum-seeker’ and be turned into an ‘under-class’. Apart from a few ‘lucky ones’, and in contrast to the working class or other marginalised groups, the vast majority of them would remain isolated in the ‘hidden layers of society’, without representation, not even permitted ‘to sell their labor’. Given this predicament and the persistent exposure to the threat of deportation, ‘non-citizens’, they concluded, ‘can do nothing but to strive to become a citizen if they want to change their marginalised condition’. At the Congress in Munich, the citizen/non-citizen dichotomy became reproduced. For some of the plenary sessions, participants were divided into groups of ‘citizens’ and ‘non-citizens’, prompting some attending migrant and solidarity activists to jokingly wonder whether passport controls were about to take place (Research Notes, 2013).5 As a result, those who had long struggled and eventually obtained a protected residence status had to participate in the ‘citizen’ plenary, with many directing critique towards the organisers, accusing them of a lack of sensitivity and a truncated analysis. For them, this rigid citizen/non-citizen split was nothing more than the reproduction and internalisation of existing legal divisions and sovereign categories, ultimately productive of novel divisions within the larger anti-racist and migrant rights movement. Migrant activists from Youth without Borders (2013), some of whom had been excluded from the ‘non-citizen’ plenary, argued that they had also experienced ‘the discriminatory and degrading conditions’ produced by the German asylum system, ‘and know exactly what it means to be threatened with deportation every day’. Members of other refugeeled organisations such as The Voice Refugee Forum, already founded in 1994, or The Caravan, founded in 1998, who had not been allowed to participate in ‘noncitizen’ meetings long before the Congress, were critical of what they conceived as a lack of appreciation for the long history of self-organised migrant and refugee resistance in Germany. Many of the criticisms levied towards the Non-Citizen organisers were underpinned by the concern voiced by Youth without Borders (2013) that instead of coming together to plan ‘concrete action, our activists had to dwell upon theories and definitions about “citizens” and “non-citizens”’. Following indeed lengthy plenary sessions where mainly members of a small group of Non-Citizen activists took the centre stage, several participants objected to the assertive participation

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of predominantly male Iranian Non-Citizens, viewed as dominant, authoritative, and lecturing, and, more generally, to the hierarchical organisation of the Congress and its gender imbalance, with very few women being heard.6 Others took issue with the Non-Citizens’ proposition that the struggle of asylum-seekers was not primarily directed against racism but, instead, the ‘capitalist exploitation of peripheral societies’ (Non-Citizens, 2013b). Unsurprisingly, this assertion – that their anti-capitalist struggle was not per se anti-racist – prompted raised eyebrows in the anti-racist scene present at the Congress. Again other participants were critical of the radical and uncompromising tactics employed throughout the year of struggle, the self-harming practices that could have easily resulted in irreversible health damages and would normalise a politics of escalation. What most of the critical voices held in common was scepticism towards what they perceived as a divisionary politics resulting from the citizen/non-citizen dichotomy that split the movement into citizens (who could function merely as ‘supporters’) and non-citizens, with nothing in-between. Once this division based upon legal identity was rigorously enforced, it would complicate or even forestall the formation of solidarity alliances and collective struggles, potentially driving wedges between and throughout (migrant) activist and solidarity networks (Research Notes, 2013). Defending their political practice and theoretical analysis, the Non-Citizens argued that in the course of their struggle, both solidarity and migrant activists had repeatedly sought to appropriate their movement for their own political ends. One Non-Citizen activist remarked: Do not ask the lowest class to struggle for the empowerment of privileged classes. We don’t even have the time to think about these other struggles. We are threatened by suicide and oppression. Several Non-Citizens bemoaned a fundamental misconception of what ‘being political’ meant for them vis-à-vis the (seemingly) legally protected migrant and citizen activists: ‘Some activists asked us: “when will you stop your protest?” But this is our life; we cannot go home like you can! I wake up and my first thought is about deportation’. Explicitly challenging the hierarchies within political activism, one Non-Citizen activist said: Activists stated that asylum-seekers were not ‘radical enough’ or not ‘politically active’ and saw ‘passport issues’ as personal. However, asylum-seekers are active but in their actions they have to face different consequences than citizens. (Research Notes, 2013) The Non-Citizens suggested that solidarity activists had to accept the reality of existing differences, so that, for the time being, divided plenaries were needed to ensure that they could make their voices heard and strategise among themselves.

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Calling for the erasure of all divisions would be a political demand simple enough for citizen-subjects to voice, but not for those who bore the brunt of non-citizenship’s violence and who were still trapped within the reality of oppressive legal categories, at great cost to them and their families. Reacting to critique, the Non-Citizens insisted that ‘anti-racist and anti-fascist groups and activists should rethink and perhaps revise the concept of anti-racism and should also revise their interaction with asylum-seeker issues accordingly’ (Non-Citizens, 2013b and 2013c). Clearly, the Non-Citizens’ interventions were directed not only to state and society, but also towards the solidarity scene, some factions of which, they felt, were seeking to impose a certain form of activist conduct and steer them onto well-trodden paths of resistance. Their campaign, however, aimed to carve out a space in which they would constitute the protagonists of their struggle, even if that space would become demarcated by novel boundaries and exclusions. Reflecting on the emergence of the Non-Citizen name and concept, one of the protesters from the hunger strike in Munich noted at the ‘No Border Lasts Forever Conference’ in Frankfurt in 2014: We decided to give us this position to outline our own struggles based on our experiences of our lives and within power structures. We wanted to go beyond the names, such as ‘criminal’, ‘asylum-seeker’, ‘refugee’. These names already have a position. (Research Notes, 2014) Rancière (1992: 61, emphasis in original) once suggested that ‘the migrant’ had lost any other political name, so that ‘an other that has no other name becomes the object of fear and rejection’. The Non-Citizens, however, appropriated an other name. This new name was chosen in an attempt to distance themselves from ascribed names, including ‘asylum-seeker’, which, as they held, was the name assigned ‘in the moment in which our feet touch their holy soil’ (Non-Citizens, 2014a). While the Non-Citizens had given themselves a ‘wrong’ name, a misnomer, it was also one imposed on them, similar to the sans papiers in France (McNevin, 2006). Their new name expressed the rejection of a name ascribed ‘by the ruling order of policy’ but was inasmuch an ‘identity given by an other’ (Rancière, 1992: 62). Even if they were not always consistent, at times referring to themselves as asylum-seekers or refugees, this search for and invention of a new name comes close to Rancière’s (1999: 36) understanding of ‘subjectification’: Any subjectification is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of a subject space where anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted, where a connection is made between having a part and having no part.

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Their self-ascribed name was one they produced in struggle and one they sought to leave behind through struggle. In the staging of political dissent, they filled the name with meaning and political consequence while also seeking to replace it by a name that, though equally not dissociable from the sovereign order, seemed to guarantee more protection, less deportability: recognised refugee, or even citizen. With their entry into the realm of citizenship, non-citizenship as a temporary condition would cease to exist, at least for them. In one of their publications, the NonCitizens inserted lengthy paragraphs from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘We Refugees’, in which he writes: In the nation-state system, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens of a state. (Non-Citizens, 2014b) The insertion of Agamben’s words is indicative of their conviction that the nationstate, and therewith citizenship, while conditioning their exclusion, nonetheless (or rather, therefore) would provide for a greater degree of protection – protection from the violence of the state. As those who had lost their status as citizens, they found themselves in a situation once observed by Hannah Arendt (1968: 300): If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man. In various discussions and proclamations at the Congress, no other analogy was as prominent as the one between Non-Citizens and animals. It emerged that many regarded, in an Arendtian way, citizenship and humanness or, rather, noncitizenship and inhumanness, as intimately interrelated: ‘We are kept like animals in cages’, ‘they treat us like animals, but we are human beings’, ‘in Germany even animals have more rights than asylum-seekers’ (Research Notes, 2013). Believing that their exclusion from citizenship would put in doubt their very recognition as humans, they sought inclusion. We believe that we are Non-Citizens, Non-Citizens who are prevented from accessing the rights that citizens hold in this society. Of all the fundamental rights of the human remain, for Non-Citizens, only a place to sleep, food parcels to eat, nightmares of deportation and a life in fear and terror. (Non-Citizens, 2014b)

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The Non-Citizens consequently regarded their entrance into the citizenry as the utmost priority in order to remedy their immediate unprotectedness and permanent condition of deportability. In this light, the insistence to think beyond sovereign citizenship as the political horizon, often voiced by activists who securely resided within the community of citizens, seemed abstract and far removed from the everyday realities of the Non-Citizens, whose formal lack of citizen status rendered them particularly exposed to sovereign violence. They regarded those endowed with citizenship as subjects who had already made it to ‘the other side’, more protected than them, less deportable, and thus able to engage in forms of resistance not accessible to them. The Non-Citizens showed awareness that their arrival in the citizen-community would not undermine the logic of the sovereign order and state system. In principle, they argued, ‘our efforts should be towards building a society that does not need this [citizen/non-citizen] dichotomy’ (Non-Citizens, 2014b). Through their dissensual resistance, they nonetheless sought to relentlessly create confrontations between what they believed were the incommensurable worlds of citizenship and non-citizenship. These confrontations functioned all the more vigorously the more antithetical these worlds were made to appear, if at the cost of marginalising those who found themselves in grey zones and somewhere inbetween these two worlds, including those whose hardship had not ended after obtaining legal recognition as refugee or citizen. Wrong/ing spaces At the Non-Citizen Congress in Munich, migrant activist Langa said that she was ‘tired of sleeping’, that ‘we have to come out to be visible, we are not illegal, we have to take the fear from our heart and give it back to the owners’ (Research Notes, 2013). For her, it seems, being tired of sleeping meant being tired of the boredom and depression of asylum centres, of confinement, isolation, and allocated food packages, of everyday deportability. Tired of their imposed existence, they decided to practice resistance by ‘[refusing] to remain in their situation’ (Rancière, 2010: 170). The cycle of migrant protests that began in 2012 was also always a struggle over spatiality and presence. As a key strategy, migrant activists repeatedly occupied central squares and spaces, thereby wronging laws of confinement. Referred to as the ‘Refugee Tent Action’, camps were set up in invaded spaces, suggesting elements of forcible appropriation, obstruction, and siege, as well as ephemerality and nomadism. Their intrusions into public spaces of leisure, consumerism, and tourism were intentional disruptions of their presumed absence and invisibility therein. With some tent camps and occupations lasting only for a few days, others remained for many months, becoming communal centres, informal employment agencies, spheres of contact, of organising, debate, retreat, food, shelter, friendship and love, as well as complaint, conflict, and violence.7

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The appropriation of the space at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was a particularly significant and difficult moment in the migrant protests of 2012, when in late October, as mentioned before, some Non-Citizen activists left the Oranienplatz, critical of those (migrant) activists who they perceived had become too ‘homely’ at the occupied square. By occupying the space of the Brandenburg Gate, they temporarily transformed a site of historic relevance, the symbol of German reunification and EUropean unity, frequented mainly by tourists, into one of present day political contestation over questions of belonging. Reacting to the public occupation and hunger strike, Berlin’s Interior Minister Henkel announced that he would not tolerate the emergence of a ‘wild camp’ (Berliner Zeitung, 2012), and police forces began to execute creative forms of harassment. Usually during the night, when temperatures fell below zero degrees Celsius, police forces would repeatedly invade the camp, conduct identity checks, wake up protesters, and remove their belongings. The use of ‘camping equipment’, including sleeping bags, pads, and hot-water bottles was forbidden. At times, even umbrellas and what the police considered ‘excessive’ clothing were disallowed, as was the use of donated wheelchairs, justified by Minister Henkel on the grounds that their use would taunt people with special needs and detrimentally affect the activists’ political cause. Exhausted and with negotiations between protestors and government representatives achieving no concrete results, the group of Non-Citizens left the Brandenburg Gate camp in November, and many began to retreat, in order, as they announced, to study and analyse their collective struggle and seek inspiration from elsewhere, with some travelling ‘illegally’ to the Netherlands, Austria, France, and Belgium (Non-Citizens, 2013a).

Image 2.2 Third day of Non-Citizen hunger strike at Pariser Platz, Berlin/Germany, October 2013 Source: Oliver Feldhaus

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The migrant activists who remained at the Oranienplatz occupied the square for more than one and a half years, viewing it, as migrant activist Langa suggested, as a central space for the movement, its ‘political centre [and] space for struggle’ (Litschko, 2013). As she wrote: The success of Oranienplatz visibilized our struggle, especially in the public, and gave us the power to negotiate with the government officially, which before then was not possible. [. . .] We stood for our rights and we opened the tents to everyone. (Langa, 2015) From the Oranienplatz, various actions were organised, including intrusions into the EU Commission in Berlin, protests at the embassies of Iran, Nigeria, and Mali, and the occupation of the vacant Gerhart-Hauptmann school building in December 2012 (Wilcke and Lambert, 2015). While, at first, the district council of Kreuzberg in Berlin tolerated the presence of migrant activists at the Oranienplatz and later in the occupied school building, multiple attempts by city and district authorities were subsequently undertaken to evict and convince their residents to move into communal accommodations provided by Caritas. Achieving an agreement with about eighty protesters, the Oranienplatz camp was taken down in April 2014 by some of the occupiers themselves, while others protested the destruction, denouncing the deal as an attempt to break up the movement.8 Unprecedented scenes of conflict flared up between migrant activists, with police forces happily disengaging. Despite Langa’s five-day-long ‘tree-occupation’ on the square, Oranienplatz as an experimental communal space and nodal point, known throughout EUrope, ceased to exist (Schumacher, 2014). In the meantime, the occupied school at Ohlauer Straße 12 in Berlin had become a refuge for some of the remaining migrant activists as well as (other) asylumseekers, refugees, and Roma families. In response to the predominance of men in the movement, both at the Oranienplatz and in the school, a group of female migrant activists converted one floor of the school building into a women-only space, calling it the International Women’s Space (Azozomox and International Women’s Space refugee women activists, 2017). While the school was, for some time, the space ‘to refuel our strength’ as activist Langa put it (Litschko, 2013), it turned increasingly into a space of conflict, with over 200 people trying to live together in adverse conditions. When an inhabitant reportedly stabbed and killed a fellow resident in April 2014, the will to evict heightened in the political ranks (Memarnia, 2014). With pressure mounting, in June 2014 about 160 inhabitants decided to accept the offer of relocation and left the school while about fourty migrant activists remained inside. Barricading themselves and climbing onto the roof, the occupiers demanded the guaranteed right to stay and threatened to jump off the building, were the police to enter.

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An unparalleled stand-off ensued, with about 1,700 police officers surrounding the school and staging a siege of the entire Kreuzberg district, day and night. Reinforced police lines could only be crossed by inhabitants of the district able to identify themselves as such, and journalists were prevented from speaking to the protesters, due to security concerns, according to the police. Up on the school building, migrant activists often stood on the very edge of the roof, looking at the unfolding scenes below. At night, they reported, police officers positioned themselves on opposite buildings, observing them and shining light into their eyes, making it impossible for them to sleep: Deprivation of sleep is only one of the methods through which they were trying to break our resistance. [. . .] During the day the police insulted [us] in racist ways. They were watching us from another roof and waving, not only with handcuffs, but also with bananas. We continue to fight for freedom of the press. We still demand that the press be allowed inside! (Ohlauer Info Point, 2014) In solidarity with the roof-protesters, thousands took to the streets, including feminist, migrant, anti-racist and anti-fascist activists as well as residents, clashing several times with the police. On the 2nd of July, the roof-protesters stated: For nine days the police and the Bezirksamt (district council) have been massively pressurizing us psychologically by repeatedly announcing and withdrawing the eviction notice. While this is happening we are holding out on the roof, surrounded by more than 1700 police officers from many federal states as well as the German Federal Police Force, and emotionally preparing ourselves to see our friends die at any moment. (Ohlauer Info Point, 2014) It did not come that far as an agreement was found later that day. The police operation, estimated to have cost over five million Euros, was called off (Keilani and Beikler, 2014). The migrant activists’ main demands were not met but a few dozen were allowed to remain on the third floor of the building without being criminally prosecuted. The character of the occupation, however, transformed in the aftermath of the stand-off. A private security service began to control the entrance of the building, and only registered inhabitants were allowed to enter. When Angela Davis wanted to visit the school in May 2015, she was not allowed inside: ‘Can someone explain to me, why can’t I go inside the school? Is it a school or a prison?’, she asked, to which people replied: ‘Yes’ (see Tosco Berlin, 2014). The last residents voluntarily vacated the building in January 2018, before their planned eviction by the police. The migrant protests in Germany produced an unprecedented visibility precisely through their continuous acts of occupying and appropriating central urban

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spaces, ‘thereby opening up new political possibilities’ (Ataç, 2016: 643). As activist Langa (2015) wrote: We occupied a vacant school, we occupied Brandenburg Gate, we went on demonstrations and hunger strikes, we occupied the tree at Oranienplatz, we occupied the roof of the school [. . .], we occupied the parliament in the district of Kreuzberg, we occupied the federal office of the Green party, we occupied the church, we occupied the UN office, we occupied embassies. Migrant activist intrusions into public spaces incited debate, support, and solidarity but provoked also harsh countermeasures. In some sense, the many occupations performed what David Harvey (2012: 4) calls ‘the right to the city’. For him, the vigour of protest movements is not simply based upon the collective presence of bodies but their performativity: instead of functioning as tourist, consumer, or banker bodies, the transformation into occupying bodies stages a demand to the city. While, for Harvey, social movements demonstrate the capacity to transform and re-invent cities by occupying spaces and turning them into ‘temporary autonomous zones’, the very presence of migrant activists, in a Rancièrean sense, wrongs public space. Routinely subjected to spaces of confinement, foremost asylum and detention centres, collective migrant activist bodies in public constitute in itself a performative act that challenges their presumed absence and unwantedness in spaces of ‘consensus society’. With Butler (2015: 11), we can then rather say that when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space (including virtual ones) they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more livable set of economic, social and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity. In order to be present in these spaces, the migrant activist must have already transgressed the law of confinement. Their public appearance, often nowhere near ‘their’ asylum accommodations, turned them into escapees – they had violated the residence law and created a presence elsewhere, where they were not supposed to be. The very act of appearing then performs the Rancièrean wrong in space, merging two worlds into one and producing encounters, and collisions, that would have not occurred otherwise. As aberrations, their intrusions turned citizen-spaces such as the Brandenburg Gate into heterotopias, spaces that not only ‘have the property of being in relation with all other sites’ (Foucault, 1986a: 24) but that distort other sites, commonsensical sites of commercial and touristic activity, and of ‘regular’ social life.9 Becoming migrant squatters, a ‘hybrid creature [. . .] that

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is deemed an invader of space’ (Mudu and Chattopadhyay, 2017: 9, 15), they publicly proclaimed their ‘existence, directly, physically and materially’. As invaders of space, they turned themselves into a provocation that challenged the sovereign and consensual order of things, an order that hundreds of police units were keen to re-establish when surrounding the school building in Berlin or when storming, in the night of the 30th of June 2013, the Rindermarkt square in Munich to forcibly evict the Non-Citizen hunger strikers. Wrong behaviour The hunger strike of June 2013 was announced to the German chancellor Merkel in an open letter. Therein, the Non-Citizens (2013a) stated that they refused to remain in isolated camps, haunted by ‘nightmares of deportation’, and excluded from the right to move freely. The several dozen strikers formed a diverse coalition, composed of those who had fled from Pakistan, Iran, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Congo, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. Declaring the German state responsible for their lives, they demanded the approval of their asylum claims, within three days. When the ultimatum ran out, they went on a dry hunger strike, their decision made, as they wrote, ‘in complete consciousness, health and political awareness’ (Non-Citizens, 2013a). This intentional escalation of struggle prompted denunciations, with representatives of the Bavarian government rejecting such methods as blackmail of the state. Although many dissensual Non-Citizen practices had caused anxiety and critique – often deemed offensive, threatening, confusing, unrealistic, utopian, or naïve – it was the dry hunger strike in Munich that was the most controversial act of all. As so often before, the Non-Citizens had occupied a public space and turned it into one of encounter and debate, provoking spontaneous solidarity avowals but also abuse by pedestrians and residents. Racist and threatening slurs directed by passers-by towards the Non-Citizens were reported, as was the instance of someone approaching the camp to consume food near the hunger strikers (Research Notes, 2013). A few days into the protest, the strikers started to refuse also water. With negotiations between a delegation of senior politicians and protesters breaking down, and time passing, more and more Non-Citizens collapsed and required medical care. Out of solidarity, a group of citizen-supporters joined the hunger strike. In their fifth and most contentious statement entitled ‘When our bodies become our weapons’, the Non-Citizens (2013a) announced their refusal to be treated by the doctors in the tent camp. This would be their last message. The threat of self-sacrifice, made repeatedly during the Non-Citizen struggle, but escalated to the point of collective near-death in Munich, forms one of the ultimate instruments of a dissensual politics, a political practice unincorporable into the world of consensus. The tactic of withdrawing from life itself in a public space can be understood with Banu Bargu (2014: 14, emphasis in original) as

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the weaponization of life, [. . .] the tactic of resorting to corporeal and existential practices of struggle, based on the technique of self-destruction, in order to make a political statement or advance political goals. The hunger strike not only transformed the protesters and their bodies but also the addressees of the strike. The Non-Citizens’ weaponisation of their bodies, with reference to Meins and Sands who had both starved to death in prison and whose martyrdom had generated protest and imitation, was a warning to the German state. In reaction, the Bavarian authorities sought to undermine the credibility of the protesters. The Non-Citizens were denounced for denying doctors access to their camp when, in fact, they had organised their own medical team that remained in the camp throughout the occupation (Non-Citizens, 2013d). They were criticised for ‘allowing’ a pregnant woman to participate in the hunger strike with her child present, when in reality the migrant activist was protesting but not hunger striking, unlike a mother of two who joined the occupation. Moreover, the NonCitizens were repeatedly portrayed as naïve, who did not understand the German legal system and were easily mislead and instrumentalised by their ‘gang-leader’, Ashkan Khorasani (Halser, 2013). Khorasani, a prominent member of the protest movement, already part of the group that had instigated the struggle in early 2012, functioned as a ‘messenger’ for the strikers. Having already been granted political asylum, he was no longer a Non-Citizen, following their own dichotomous definition, and thus not ‘allowed to take any decisions’ or speak in the name of the protestors (Non-Citizens, 2013a). He, nonetheless, was portrayed by the Bavarian government as the main agitator of the rebellion. As the Interior Minister Herrmann stated: ‘[Khorasani] used the lives of others to accomplish political goals’ (Guyton, 2013, my translation). Depicting the strike as ‘a confrontation between the government and one individual person’, the Non-Citizens (2013a) suggested that the government sought to again turn them into ‘weak objects [. . .] without any independent will so that a person is required to lead us’. The dominant narrative, propagated by government and mainstream media, revolved around the notions of ‘blackmail’ and ‘humanitarian responsibility’. Minister Haderthauer remarked, ‘in this country the political system cannot be blackmailed, we live in a country based on the rule of law where a hunger strike cannot enforce preferential treatment’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2013a, my translation).10 Minister Herrmann, pointing to the reference to Meins and Sands, declared, ‘the gang-leaders have placed themselves on a level with terrorists’ (Halser, 2013, my translation). The implication of blackmail and terrorism allowed authorities to revert to harsh measures, leading to the eviction. At the same time, the forceful clearance of the camp was also legitimised on humanitarian grounds. The state, so another prevalent discourse went, would not allow deaths on its streets. Munich’s mayor Ude suggested that ‘the absolute priority is to protect life and limb’, and Minister Herrmann maintained after the eviction that ‘it was right and necessary,

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in the interest of rescuing human lives, to bring them today to a hospital and not to wait any longer’ (Die Welt, 2013, my translation). Referring repeatedly to the alleged denial of access of doctors assigned to the camp by the city, Ude and Herrmann alluded to an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe at their doorstep that necessitated a response by the state, due to its ‘duty to protect’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2013b). Seeking to find an adequate strategy to respond to the ‘wrong behaviour’ of the strikers, the political authorities veered between denouncing the protest as terroristic blackmail and voicing concern for the health of the strikers, repeatedly shifting between what could be conceived, with Foucault, as sovereign and disciplinary or biopolitical modes of governing (see also Chapter 6). Certainly unable to ‘let die’ (Foucault, 2004: 254), also in light of the vast public attention that the protest had drawn, they had to care for life, in fact save life, and at the same time discipline and punish those lives demanding care, a level of care not meant for them. While expendable in depression-inducing asylum centres, where self-harm and even suicide go nearly unnoticed, their forceful intrusion into public space turned starving Non-Citizens into indispensable lives, even if only momentarily. For Ewa Ziarek (2008: 100), hunger strikes cause anxiety in the dominant order by staging ‘a political trial of existing law and political authority’ through the starvation of one’s own body, thereby collapsing ‘distinctions between passivity and activity, actuality and potentiality, victim and enemy’. In her discussion of the use of hunger strikes by British suffragettes, she (2008: 102) notes: By reversing the roles of the defendants and the accusers, the hunger strike performs a double chiasmatic transfer. On the one hand, it transforms the private act of starvation into a collective contestation of the law; on the other hand, it summons the yet nonexistent authority of the new law by risking the physical life of the body. As a ‘catachrestic movement’, Ziarek (2008: 102, 100) suggests, the hunger strike ‘repeats, mimics, and exposes in public the hidden irrational violence of the sovereign state’ and, at the same time, as a ‘non-act’, ‘negates [. . .] exclusion and calls for the transformation of the law’. Circulating images of haggard and collapsing Non-Citizens made the sovereign violence of exclusion visible, inscribed onto their weakened and failing bodies. According to Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat (2005: 24, 20), through the tactics of hunger striking and lip-sewing, ‘sovereign power’s production of bare life’ is re-enacted, thereby exposing ‘the way in which sovereign power [. . .] relies on violence and exclusion’. For them, sovereignty constitutes not a relation of power, but one of violence, so that acts of assuming bare life would be the only remaining repertoire of resistance. However, when the Non-Citizens forced state authorities to react to their neardeath, they did more than mimic sovereign violence. Their spectacle of the hunger

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strike functioned as a heterology, a form of political subjectivation through the practice of self-harm that merged seemingly incommensurable worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dead, the citizen’s presence and the other’s absence, prompting and revealing conflictual modalities of governing, those based upon sovereign violence and those of biopolitical care. Passing the responsibility for their survival to authorities, they forced them to re-act to their active nonact, thereby blurring further the roles of monopolist of violence and humanitarian protector. Such acts of resistance expose what Bargu (2014: 54, 84, emphases in original) has called a ‘biosovereign assemblage’, the ‘paradoxical combination of the power of life with the power over life’, the former usually associated with sovereign and the latter with biopolitical modalities of power: In biosovereignty, life is the object and objective of power; it is the supreme value of the system, even though the control and government of life is undergirded and maintained by sovereign power of life, exercised in the form of the power to kill. Bringing this biosovereign assemblage into play through the hunger strike, NonCitizen dissent can be conceived, rather than the assumption of bare life, as ‘resistance to bare life’, a form of ‘necroresistance’ that, according to Bargu (2014: 81, 85, emphasis in original), ‘transforms the body from a site of subjection to a site of insurgency, which by self-destruction presents death as a counterconduct to the administration of life’. The Non-Citizen hunger strikers alluded to death as a possibility of escape from non-citizenship, as a radical way of breaking out from what they conceived of as a condition of imprisonment. When exploring Sands’ self-sacrificial act in Northern Ireland, and hunger strikes within prisons more generally, Nicholas Michelsen (2016: 102) interprets such protest as ‘grounded on its offer of an absolute breakout, a line of flight’. Driven by a combination of desperation and absolute political conviction, the hunger strike is underpinned by a politics that ‘assumes commitment to one’s own deterritorialization, which makes possible the deterritorialization of the prison and the social order it inscribes’ (2016: 102). The Non-Citizen’s counter-conduct of starvation was responded to through eviction by the German police: On early Sunday morning, June the 30th, at 4:30am, more than 300 riot police forces attacked our camp. The hunger strikers of the camp got evicted; some of us were sent to hospital, some to prison. (Non-Citizens, 2013a) Clearing the camp, strategically carried out in the early hours of the day with little media presence, was the pronunciation of the biopolitical and sovereign assemblage of power, for which the hospital and prison can be conceived as institutional

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representations. Dragged away by police in riot gear, Non-Citizens and supporters reported of excessive use of force and degrading treatment. The independent medical team later stated: The proposition of ‘humanitarian grounds’ cannot have been the decisive factor as the eviction itself threatened the already compromised health conditions of the [. . .] hunger strikers, consciously endangering their lives. Additionally, in up to seven hours in police custody after the eviction, no medical attendance was offered to the hunger strikers. (Non-Citizens, 2013d)11 The act of eviction, which was ruled unlawful ‘in form and substance’ by the regional court of Munich in 2015 (Rost, 2015, my translation), was the expression of both biosovereign violence and care, albeit a minimal form of care.12 Both the ‘blackmail’ of the state by migrant activists and their self-sacrificial death on Germany’s streets could not be tolerated. Although the eviction succeeded, it did not go unnoticed that Non-Citizen dissent had presented the authorities with a considerable dilemma. Paradoxically, in a state between life and death, those who usually have ‘no part’ suddenly demanded attention and forced state and government to respond. In the aftermath, many protesters were quietly granted Aufenthaltsrecht, the right to stay (Jakob, 2016a). The movement did not cease to exist but regrouped and continued its dissensual practices, at times in different form and under different names. The wrong behaviour of hunger striking spread amongst migrant movements, ceaselessly confusing and blurring protector–punisher roles, sovereign violence and biopolitical care. In the winters of 2014 and 2016, migrant activists staged large collective hunger strikes at the Sendlinger Tor square in Munich – not as Non-Citizens but as the ‘Refugee Struggle For Freedom’ (2016). They announced: ‘We are already dying every day in our restricted lives. So let us die in front of the world in hunger strike’. In both years, police units evicted the strikers, and nobody died.

Two worlds, many worlds Equality, for Rancière (2010: 32, emphasis in original), is enacted in scenes of dissensus that rupture the police order: ‘The one who belongs to the demos, who speaks when he is not to speak, is the one who partakes in what he has no part in’. The Non-Citizen struggle mobilised those discarded into asylum centres and created a platform for their bodies and voices to appear where they were not meant to be seen and heard. Whilst their political interventions aimed at gaining citizenship, they constituted, more than anything else, movements both toward and against citizenship in the way Tyler and Marciniak (2013: 146) have conceived of ‘immigrant protests’ that visibilise ‘the violence of citizenship as regimes of control’ but (have to) ‘make their demands in the idiom of the regime of citizenship’. While migrant rights movements all over the world find themselves in this double bind that is

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difficult to escape, it was through the radical practices of dissent that the NonCitizens brought to the fore the very ambivalence of citizenship, an ambivalence that they, however, mostly refused to acknowledge themselves (McNevin, 2013). The worlds of citizenship and non-citizenship were never as hermetically sealed or incompatible as the Non-Citizens made them out to be. Although they presented themselves as an ‘under-class’ fully outside of the political realm, they were deeply entangled in a biopolitical border regime that, while marginalising them and wasting their time (Schwarz, 2015), also incorporated them and assigned to them a certain (productive) role. Always already differentially included (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2011), not least through their deportability ‘that has historically rendered undocumented migrant labor a distinctly disposable commodity’ (De Genova, 2002: 438), the Non-Citizens were never completely confined to the outside but constituted, rather, ‘immanent others inside the polity’ (McNevin, 2006: 137). Complicating inside–outside binaries, which the (temporary) status of asylumseeker in and of itself does, the wide spectrum of non/citizenship encompasses statuses and rights that are often temporary, volatile, fragmented, and hierarchical, at times becoming commodified, hollowed out, or even revoked (Nyers, 2011). In the context of Germany, these fluctuating statuses range from, as Abimbola Odugbesan and Helge Schwiertz (2018, emphases in original) note, the illegalized position of undocumented migrants; to the de facto illegalized status of toleration (Duldung), which is according to the German Residence Act only a temporary suspension of deportation; to the temporary status of the permission to reside (Aufenthaltsgestattung) for asylum seekers; to different temporary residency statuses issued by other European states, which prevent a person with such a status from obtaining many social rights in Germany; to various forms of time-limited and unlimited residency permits. This multitude of legal categories, governmental techniques par excellence, provokes divisions among those holding different statuses, rights, and privileges – forming ‘a major cause for conflicts within the broader movement of migratory and refugee struggles in Germany’ (Odugbesan and Schwiertz, 2018). As Mezzadra (2015: 124) has warned against, a naturalised or ontologically fixated definition of citizenship would ‘obscure the lines of fracture that crisscross it and destabilize the very figure of the “citizen”’. Rather than trying to fixate something that is in motion, the arbitrary governance of mobilities through citizenship categories requires exposure: ‘All domination is arbitrary and its success depends on its ability to conceal its arbitrariness’ (Isin, 2002: 276). The Non-Citizen’s inscription into citizenship regimes does not put in doubt that the acquisition of the status as a recognised refugee, regarded as a crucial step towards formal citizenship rights, would have allowed for a greater degree of protection from sovereign violence. It also does not mean that their political strategies based upon radical citizen/non-citizen dualisms were not effective in

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continuously producing frictions in the regime of citizenship itself. In fact, it was through dissensual struggle that the violence but also the volatility and vulnerability of citizenship were exposed. Recognising that citizenship, following Isin (2009: 383), ‘is in flux is not to lament its fluid and dynamic structure but to theorize and to account for its instability’. The Non-Citizens were able to inflict ‘ruptures and contradictions [. . .] upon the institutional definition and codification of citizenship’, precisely due to its ‘constantly contestable and controvertible’ nature (Rigo, 2011: 200, 210). Certainly, they did not achieve their goal of refugee status for all asylum-seekers in Germany. They could not halt all deportations, and residence laws still exist, severely curtailing asylum-seekers’ mobility. They did achieve, however, ‘a variety of small victories’, as migrant activist Turgay Ulu (2014: 38, my translation) modestly asserted. They were, as Jakob (2012, my translation) noted already in October 2012, the ‘longest and the most radical cycle of organised refugee protests in Germany’. They instigated some of the largest demonstrations for the rights of migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees in Germany, and prompted unprecedented attention in the media, and society at large. They rallied a movement behind them that supported the struggle to the point of engaging in solidarity hunger strikes, and while some of their discursive and practical interventions created tensions and fissures in the larger anti-racist movement, they also renewed needed discussions on forms of conduct and counter-conduct within spaces of resistance and raised awareness about oppressions, positionalities, and privileges within the activist community (Buschmann and Kasparek, 2014). Their struggle captivated and mobilised a range of societal actors, including churches, NGOs, and unions, often forcing them to take a political stance. They renewed a debate on the in/humaneness of communal accommodation centres and on the legality and enforcement of residence laws, the scope of which was since amended or loosened in several federal states. According to the Bavarian Refugee Council (2013), the abolition of food parcels in Bavaria would not have occurred without the large-scale protests and the hunger strike in Munich in June 2013. Moreover, following the Non-Citizens’ ‘necroresistance’, the Ministry for Migration and Refugees (2013) stated that in order to de-escalate the situation, it had accelerated the processing of the strikers’ asylum claims. The phrase in Bavaria’s asylum legislation that communal accommodation centres were intended to ‘increase the willingness to return to the country of origin’ was removed (Jakob, 2016a: 139, my translation). The Non-Citizens also revealed the conflictual entanglement of sovereign and biopolitical logics of power, bringing into play contradictions and tensions that resulted in often confused reactions, located somewhere between violence and care: ‘representatives of the sovereign order display a striking anxiety whenever the abject foreigner takes on the status of a political activist engaged in acts of self-determination’ (Nyers, 2003: 1080). Moreover, their struggle travelled beyond Germany and animated the EUropean dimension of the border regime. Whilst legally restricted in their freedom to move,

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several migrant activists not only repeatedly transgressed local boundaries within Germany but also inner-EUropean borders: ‘our voices passed imaginary borders and echoed in surrounding geographies; now Vienna, Amsterdam and Den Haag were raging’ (Non-Citizens, 2013e). In their so-called ‘Transnational Tour 2013’, migrant activists travelled without authorisation to Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (Non-Citizens, 2013f). At every stop, they met local migrant activists, discussed their country-specific or EUrope-related grievances and spread the message of their attempt ‘to build a transnational network of refugee protests to prepare for an uprising’ before the EU parliamentary elections in May 2014 (Non-Citizens, 2013f). In May and June 2014, then, hundreds of migrant activists and supporters came together for the ‘March to Freedom’ from Strasbourg to Brussels, stating: We have a dream: Freedom of movement and of residence for all asylum seekers; Stop the Dublin trap and the obligatory residence in Lagers throughout Europe; Permanent documents without criteria; Stop the imprisonment and deportation of migrants; Same working conditions for all; Same political, social and cultural rights for all: right to study and to work; Stop the European imperialist policies: no more free trade treaties and NATO-wars; Abolish Frontex, Eurosur and other antimigration policies and measures. (March for Freedom, 2014) Finally, several of the Non-Citizens achieved what they were set out to achieve: they escaped their perceived condition of non-citizenship after being granted the right to stay. And yet, as activist Ulu (2014: 38, my translation) wrote, ‘the most important victory we claimed was the fact that we rejected a life in isolation that was imposed on us and created a communal life on the streets. We really escaped our boundaries’.

Dissensual resistance Dissent is one facet of resistance, its most visible one. Migrant dissent, as shown in this chapter, often is confrontational, loud, antagonistic, and public, forcing government officials and EUropean citizens to respond to those unwilling to remain in often extremely precarious and vulnerable situations. The dissensual resistance of the Non-Citizens formed in response to the suicide of a friend and fellow resident. When they held a demonstration on the first anniversary of Rahsepar’s death, they stated: ‘He was searching for freedom. This is the result. He hung himself on the 28th of January 2012 in his room’ (Non-Citizens, 2013g). Their struggle was a protest against the conditions that had made his life unbearable: the inability to move freely and to reunite with wife and child, the constant fear of deportation, the impossibility of leading a dignified human life. Repeatedly, the Non-Citizens nearly

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ended their own lives, demonstrating ‘that vulnerability, understood as a deliberate exposure to power, is part of the very meaning of political resistance as an embodied enactment’ (Butler, 2016: 22). The Non-Citizen movement heralded a new wave of contentious migrant protests. While many of these forms of dissent had already been practiced in other contexts and struggles, the Non-Citizens’ intransigence and radicalism drew unprecedented support, attention, and disapproval. Conceiving of these expressions of resistance as method, as both catalyst and analytic, the NonCitizen practices of dissent animated German-EUropean borderwork that sought to ascribe ‘right’ names to them, banning them to confined spaces, and expecting them to be grateful in return. Not wanting handouts or pity, the Non-Citizens demanded something that was taken away from them, their rights as human beings, their dignity, and their freedom to lead lives unencumbered by ‘deportation nightmares’. Dissent as a repertoire of resistance in migrant struggles is, of course, not merely enacted by the Non-Citizens. Demonstrations, occupations, and hunger strikes have occurred in and beyond EUrope, verifying, indeed, an ‘explosion of “immigrant protests”’ (Tyler and Marciniak, 2013: 143). Many of the Non-Citizen demands are currently voiced throughout EUrope: the abolition of detention centres, the halting of deportations, freedom from criminalisation and police or borderguard violence, the right to reside where one pleases, to education, to work and to free movement, the ability to re-unify with family members, to choose food and medical care independently, and to be seen and heard as equals. The amplification and circulation of migrant struggles indicates growing unrest against the EUropean border regime, and denials of an identity ‘given by the ruling order of policy’ (Rancière, 1992: 62). That, as in the case of the Non-Citizens, such denial of an imposed identity is voiced at the same time as a citizen-identity is longed for points to an ambivalence that characterises migrant dissent for citizenship, rather than to a paradox. The ambivalence resides in the fact that becoming a citizen often precisely allows for what Foucault calls ‘desubjugation’ (1993: 203), a life less exposed to demeaning governmental orders, categories, and unwanted names. Resistance is often only understood when it ruptures, visibly and audibly, and on a public stage. This entails that dissent is commonly regarded as not merely a facet of resistance, but resistance as such. For Rancière (2010: 69), ‘[a] political subject is a capacity for staging scenes of dissensus’. However, can we understand those who cannot, or do not want to, stage these antagonistic scenes of dissent also as resistant subjects? I will explore this question in the following chapter. When the hunger striking Non-Citizens risked their lives in Munich, in June 2013, I was in Athens, drawn to EUrope’s outer borderzone. Those I encountered there often dreamt of being where the hunger strikers already were, in Germany. Arrested in Greek transit, they often did not engage in dissensual contestations but sought rather quietly to leave Greece and move to western EUrope. Can we conceive their movements and acts of escape, which I develop as migratory excess, as another facet of resistance that contests the EUropean border regime’s desire for orderly and obedient migrant subjects?

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Notes 1 All publications emerging from the migrant activist movement are referenced as NonCitizen sources. This is not entirely adequate as the name ‘Non-Citizen’ itself emerged only after the first year of struggle and as not everyone in the movement referred to themselves as Non-Citizens. Nonetheless, I have opted to do so in order to guarantee clarity and consistency for the reader, and to keep the references together in the bibliography. 2 All Non-Citizen publications cited in this chapter were originally written in English. 3 ‘Lagerpflicht’, or ‘camp duty’ literally translated, is a law specific to Bavaria that obliges asylum-seekers to remain in specific communal accommodations. 4 Please note that I not only translated this statement for the Non-Citizens from English into German but also corrected/changed some of the wording/paragraphs, always in close cooperation with a Non-Citizen activist and a solidarity activist. 5 Sentiments gathered at (public) events, such as those at the Non-Citizen Congress, and replicated in this chapter, will be referred to as ‘research notes’. In most cases, I have decided to omit names for safety reasons. I have referred to them only with name if their names had already appeared in public statements. 6 The Non-Citizens would later react to criticism concerning the small number of women in the struggle, stating that they were well aware of discriminatory and patriarchal social structures so that also ‘the field of the struggle is conquered by male bodies’. They proposed the creation of spaces in which women could ‘independently organize and empower themselves’ and argued that ‘male bodies [would have to] leave the dominant positions they inhabit’ (Non-Citizens, 2013c). 7 For example, both the portable washroom at the Oranienplatz as well as the later erected information tent were burned to the ground, with the police quickly discarding suspicions of racist motifs. 8 Weeks later, it became clear that the signed agreement which had promised the migrant activists an individual case-by-case review was undermined by Minister Henkel who, after finding a legal loophole, argued that the agreement was not legally binding. See the open letter written and signed by migrant rights groups, lawyers, and activists (Republikanischer Anwältinnen- und Anwälteverein e.V., 2014). 9 Heterotopic spaces, for Foucault (1986a: 24), ‘have the curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’. As ‘other spaces within’ heterotopias can function as mirror images, distorting and calling into question the presumed normalcy and the distinctness of spaces. 10 The German term ‘Politik’ (which cannot be translated as ‘politics’) was translated as ‘political system’ as it is commonly used to refer to political decision makers and institutions, the government, the state. 11 Please note that I translated the statement of the medical group for the Non-Citizens from German into English on 25/07/2013. 12 Non-Citizen activist Khorasani, as a solidarity activist told me, was the first to be arrested during the eviction. He was accused of attempted manslaughter, brought to the police station, and interrogated by the homicide division which launched an investigation. More than a year later, the charges were dropped. Khorasani, as did many other protesters, had to nonetheless pay a heavy fine. According to activist Anna (name changed), this was one of the police strategies to ‘erase a movement’: ‘Following the protest we were all unable to continue to struggle on the street, simply because we did not have any money for new lawsuits. Still today [April 2018], I pay off my fine’. Email exchanges with activist and supporter Anna, 05/11/2017–19/03/2018, translated by myself from German to English.

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This chapter offers an account of how Greece was experienced by those who sought to settle elsewhere.1 For many unauthorised travellers only a stepping stone, Greek-EUrope has turned into a gateway, or obstacle, to a beyond that seems to promise a future of arrival, safety, work, and freedom. While the first ethnographic study examined dissent as a form of migrant resistance, this chapter attunes to another facet, namely excess. Through an engagement with diverse migration experiences that usually ‘make no headlines’ (Scott, 1985: 36), it is explored how, if at all, practices of migration and everyday contestation can be understood as struggles that are the less capturable and controllable the more clandestine, imperceptible, unruly, unforeseeable, stubborn, or, in one word, excessive, they are. Can and should we understand these inordinate forces of migration that are ‘informal, often covert, and concerned largely with immediate, de facto gains’ (1985: 33), as political resistances? Excess, commonly employed to describe a surplus or a behaviour that goes beyond what is proper, permitted, or desirable, can by definition hardly be measured. Nonetheless, in Foucauldian and poststructuralist thought, excess is located in meaning and practice as something that renders the human subject not fully readable, nameable, and determinable, that constitutes a remainder, a surprise, a supplement, a void, or madness. As something that cannot fully be grasped, that necessarily escapes, excess seems to engender a potentiality and creativity to be, remain, or become ‘otherwise’. For Sergei Prozorov (2007: 65, emphasis added), Foucault’s ‘ontological conception of freedom’ can be conceived as a ‘potentiality for being otherwise that exceeds every historical determination of being through the constitution of an identity, the articulation of a discourse or the construction of a diagram’. Excess, it seems, inhabits freedom and freedom excess, allowing for the possibility to (re-)invent and (re-)imagine one’s being, even when confronted with abyssal violence or governmentally enforced identities. The notion of excess, implicitly or explicitly, reverberates throughout conceptions of unauthorised migration as proposed by the Autonomy of Migration (AoM). In conceiving migration as autonomous, as discussed in Chapter 1, the AoM departs

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from a portrayal of migrant subjects as primarily vulnerable, passive, or abject victims. Challenging orthodox, economistic, or static theorisations that view migration simply as a response to clearly reducible factors that ‘push’ or ‘pull’, or as rather passive reactions to socio-economic needs and pressures, the AoM emphasises the unpredictability of migration, its stubbornness, and inherent recalcitrance that subverts, mocks, or overcomes attempts of (border) control and the figuration of ‘the migrant’ in policy which seems to always violate human multiplicity, inventiveness, and potential. In many scholarly accounts associated with the AoM, notions in the (loosely defined) semantic field of excess are employed to foster an understanding of migration’s supposed autonomy: escape, primacy, creativity, potentiality, uncontrollability, supplement, anonymity, independence, surplus, imperceptibility. Mezzadra (2011: 121, emphasis added) argues that the gaze of autonomy shows ‘how the “politics of control” itself is compelled to come to terms with a “politics of migration” that structurally exceeds its (re)bordering practices’. According to Bojadžijev and Karakayalı (2010), the AoM allows ‘exploring migratory lines of flight as social movement in the intermediate zones, where migration slips out of the hands of regulative, codifying, and stratifying policies’. As a creative force never fully tameable, De Genova (2010: 59, emphasis added) detects in the freedom of movement a ‘defiant reminder that the creative powers of human life, and the sheer vitality of its productive potential, must always exceed every political regime’. Migratory subjects, then, are said to exceed border control, in the original sense of the term: to ‘go over a boundary or specified point’, ‘be greater in number or size than’, ‘go beyond what is allowed or stipulated’, ‘to surpass’ (Oxford Dictionary, 2016). Underlying these accounts is the idea of migration as something that is always at work, actively transforming the social, making worlds, not as a collective subject or political party implementing political programmes or demanding policy change, but as a multitude of people on the move excessively changing everything around us. There is, it seems, an anarchic unruliness to migration itself when understood as an ungovernable current transcending political spaces, thereby challenging and altering these spaces and politics, even if imperceptibly and inaudibly (Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, 2008). These subversions, other than in mainstream ‘left’ accounts or reductive definitions of what constitutes the political, are always-already inscribed in the political, but excessively so, without having to formulate a manifesto or even claim their politicality (Mitropoulos, 2007). This second ethnographic chapter enquires into the idea of migration as an excessive force and explores whether and how its subjects were able to subvert borders through a politics of escape. In many encounters with those in Greek transit, I wondered whether the idea of migratory excess would articulate itself in some guise, or, instead, become questioned and challenged. While excess can hardly be measured, it should also not remain a mere, at times romanticised, taken-forgranted assumption. Migratory (border) subversions are material realities and as such must have observable facets, even if only as fleeting moments and gestures.

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Instead of following particular (migrant activist) struggles, as the other two ethnographic chapters do, I engaged in encounters with various individuals, families, or groups who sought to leave Greece through different corridors. The task to explore everyday migration struggles has proven to be complex and challenging, continuously demanding critical reflection on my involvement and the ways in which encounters with others were re-narrated. It would have been impossible to meet the many protagonists of this chapter and gain their trust without an implication in some form of solidarity activism. While meeting Jaser in Athens was by chance, the encounters with others on Lesvos and in Patras were only possible through the support of activist solidarity networks for which I am grateful. Most of their identities were anonymised if they had not explicitly asked to be mentioned by name. Fortunately, I was able to remain in contact with some, mostly virtually, so that I could not only enquire into some of the details I had missed during our initial conversations but also hear about their whereabouts, well-being, and continuous struggle. It is important to note that most of the people in transit I was able to speak to were men. All the inhabitants of the factory in Patras were young male Afghans and also the individuals I met in Athens and on Lesvos were predominantly male. This reflects common migratory practices and hierarchies, with young men more likely to emigrate, often also alone or in small groups, than young women who I encountered, if at all, as part of families. The border obstacles that EUrope creates for certain individuals, groups, and populations are also always highly gendered obstacles (see Bosworth, Fili and Pickering, 2017; Freedman, Kivilcim and Özgür Baklacıoğlu, 2017; Aradau, 2008). That I engaged mainly with men is, at the same time, also a reflection of my own gendered presence which meant that even in situations where female individuals were there, exchanges especially with members of the (Yazidi) Syrian community were mainly had between the men of the families and me. Some of Jaser’s female relatives only told their stories when I was accompanied by a female migrant rights lawyer who engaged in conversations, with me merely listening and taking notes in the background. While the situation could not be easily changed, at least in these particular fieldwork encounters, it requires acknowledgement and it is, therefore, even more important to regard the protagonists of this chapter not as paradigmatic figures of ‘the’ migration experience. Gender differences and unequal subject positions within migratory networks that are, at times, hierarchically organised and composed of multiple internal dependencies, are too often readily ignored, which means that some voices are heard more than others, as Martina Benz and Helen Schwenken (2005) have emphasised in their critical account of the AoM approach. This chapter is organised in four main parts. After sketching out Greek-EUropean border dilemmas, I follow transient populations into the borderscapes of Lesvos, Athens, and Patras in the second part, before turning in part three to Foucault’s infamous men whose seemingly autonomously anonymous lives were disrupted by

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unfortunate collisions with sovereign power. Part four wonders what the struggles of those in Greek transit might tell us, as analytics, about the relationship between (migratory) excess and (border) control in contemporary EUrope.

Greek-EUropean border dilemmas Contemporary Greece constitutes an agglomerate of EUrope’s border dilemmas. As Balibar notes (2004: 2, emphasis in original): border areas – zones, countries, and cities – are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather are at the center. If Europe is for us first of all the name of an unresolved political problem, Greece is one of its centers, not because of the mythical origins of our civilization [. . .] but because of the current problems concentrated there. Its geographical location close to Turkey has turned Greece into one of EUrope’s main entry points for people on the move and has subsequently drawn the gaze of the EUropean border regime. Various interlinking Greek-EUropean border reinforcements and policies were enacted within a few years’ time. In 2010, Frontex established its presence in the Eastern Mediterranean region by opening its first ‘Operational Office’ in Greece, and deployed, for the first time ever, its ‘Rapid Border Intervention Teams’ along the Greek-Turkish border, replaced in 2011 by the re-activated and extended Joint Operation Poseidon (Frontex, 2010 and 2012a; Human Rights Watch, 2011). In 2012, the year before I travelled to Greece, Frontex reported that it was along the Greek-Turkish border that ‘two-thirds of all detections at the EU-level were reported, [. . .] a 29% increase compared to the year before’ (Frontex, 2012b). The Austrian Interior Minister Leitner referred to the Greek border as an ‘open barn door’, while Germany’s Interior Minister Friedrich threatened that Schengen border controls could be reinstated with Greece (Pro Asyl, 2013; EurActiv, 2012). The Greek government thus deployed 1,881 police officers to the Greek-Turkish border in summer 2012 through its Operation Aspida (Greek for ‘shield’) (Frontex, 2012a). Around the same time, Greece erected new or enlarged existing detention centres, ‘for the most part financed by the European Union’ (Pro Asyl, 2013), and completed the construction of the 12.5-kilometre long Evros border fence on its land border with Turkey in December 2012 (Amnesty International, 2014). Shortly after a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ was agreed upon between Frontex and Turkey in order to cooperate ‘in the fields of risk analysis, training as well as research and development’ (Frontex, 2012c), a EU-Turkey readmission policy was initialled in June 2012 ‘to swiftly return persons who are irregularly residing on their [meaning EU member states’ and Turkey’s] territories’ (European Commission, 2012a).

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These intersecting dynamics need to be seen, to a large extent, as a response to the mounting political pressures exerted by EU member states and institutions on the Greek government to further securitise its external borders and prevent transitory movements towards Western EUropean countries. While before, following the Dublin Regulation, EU member states would routinely deport those who ‘irregularly’ travelled into their territories back to Greece, this had changed after a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 2011. The Afghan interpreter ‘MSS’ had entered Greece in 2008, was registered on the Eurodac system, but then travelled on to Belgium and was deported back to Greece. In his complaint about his treatment by Greece and Belgium, the ECtHR found both countries in violation of Articles 3 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, concerning ‘MSS’s conditions in detention, his general living conditions and the inadequacy of the asylum determination system’ (Clayton, 2011: 763). The MSS ruling had far-reaching consequences as most EU member states suspended deportations to Greece. In turn, with one deportation destiny fewer on the map, EU member states began to demand the ‘sealing off’ of Greece’s internal EUropean borders. In view of these developments, it becomes clear that for EUrope, at the time and still, Greece constitutes a particularly problematic border area, central not merely in matters of austerity politics but also in matters of migrant deterrence. Failing to prevent the arrival of about 856,000 travellers on the Greek islands in 2015 and more than 173,000 in 2016, the many Greek-EUropean border enforcement efforts were evidently unable to do what they were designed to do (UNHCR, 2018). In light of the large-scale transformations that these movements manifested, nothing less than the momentary collapse of the EUropean border regime, I wondered whether my ethnography of 2013 with people ‘stuck’ in Greece still had relevance. I had travelled to Greece knowing not only about the dissensual practices of unauthorised migrants there and the vast range of solidarity campaigns that Greek civil society and activist networks had mobilised in support, but also about the predicaments those stranded there faced: surging resentment in some societal segments as epitomised by the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party, economic hardship and exploitation in times of a stringently imposed EUropean austerity regime crippling the Greek economy, racialised harassment by the police and other authorities, a dismally slow and confusing asylum system, and a severe lack of access to legal remedies, representation, and recourse in cases of rights violations.2 The rapid and enormous border transgressions of 2015 and the arrival of many in Germany and Sweden within weeks, not months or years as before, seemed to have fundamentally altered the relationship between capture and subversive transborder movements, in favour of the latter. The phenomenon I had explored – thousands stranded in Greek transit, unable to continue their west-bound journeys – seemed to have become a problem of the past. Unsurprisingly, however, Greece was sought to be turned back into a place of arrest, a country as EUropean frontier zone. The combined effects of

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progressively closing the Balkan route and the fortification of EUrope’s external borders in the Aegean following the infamous EU-Turkey deal of March 2016, led to a significant decrease in migration. In 2017, fewer than 30,000 arrivals were recorded on the Greek islands, a dramatic decline from the over one million arrivals in the preceding two years.3 Currently, tens of thousands remain stuck on the islands and in mainland Greece, a EUropean border and political problem seemingly more unresolved than ever. My research and activism took me to Lesvos Island, Athens, and Patras as these three places were evoked, in (migrant) activist circles, time and again as memorable places of migrant struggles. They can be productively conceived, at least initially, as ‘borderscapes’, a notion described by Prem Rajaram and Carl GrundyWarr (2007: x) as indicating ‘the complexity and vitality of, and at, the border’, serving as an entry point ‘for a study of the border as mobile, perspectival, and relational’. Folding into theorisations of the border offered by Critical Border Studies, they (2007: xxix–xxx) write: The term borderscape reminds one of the specter of other senses of the border, of experiences, economies, and politics that are concealed. The instrumental usage of the border as a tool of governmentality must always be incomplete. [. . .] The borderscape is thus a zone of varied and differentiated encounters. It is neither enveloped by the state nor semantically exhaustible. When this conception of the border is conjoined with an understanding of migration as autonomous, they seem to appear as the other sides of the same coin. Ranabir Samaddar’s (2005: 9–10) definition of autonomy, popular within the AoM, as ‘governmentality’s other’, meaning that ‘autonomy always points to the supplement that remains after (the task of) government has been achieved’, would offer autonomous migration as the missing link, the force that makes the border as a ‘tool of governmentality’ incomplete and inept. The excess of migration seems to be precisely what turns the border into a non-exhaustible borderscape. In order to explore this relationship between (migratory) excess and (border) control, often mapping onto the relationship between resistance and power, the question Walters (2015a: 9) has raised will accompany this chapter: ‘what do we gain but also what do we lose when we conceptualize power in terms of borders?’ Or, asked slightly differently: what do we gain but also what do we lose when we conceptualise resistance in terms of excessive migration?

The borderscape of Lesvos The island of Lesvos, the largest of the Greek islands in the North-Eastern Aegean, is for many the first point of entry into EUrope. Given the increased securitisation of the Greek-Turkish land border, migration movements have further shifted to

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the Aegean Sea. Lesvos is separated from mainland Turkey only by the narrow Mytilene Strait. Standing on its eastern shores, Turkish infrastructure on the other side, roughly six miles away, is easily visible. Ferries with tourists on board travel frequently, return trips between Ayvalik and Mytilene take an hour and a half and cost about 35 Euros. It is here, in the strait, that in December 2012 the bodies of twenty-one Afghan travellers were recovered near Thermi, close to the island’s capital Mytilene, and six others went missing (WatchTheMed, 2014). In March 2013, six Syrian nationals died in their attempt to reach the island (Amnesty International, 2013a). Another tragedy occurred on the 21st of January 2014, with twelve people drowning, after what seems to have been yet another illegal ‘pushback’ operation by Greek borderguards (BBC, 2014a). They are among hundreds of counted persons who have died in the Aegean Sea, even before the mass crossings of 2015 and early 2016, when 1,240 people are known to have lost their lives there (UNHCR, 2018). For the survivors of the perilous journey that can cost several hundred Euros, Lesvos is a point of transit, not of settlement, and it is here that many experience EUrope for the first time. As one of EUrope’s outposts, the island has become another symbol of its violent borders, but also one of undeterred migrant struggle. In October 2013, I travelled to Lesvos to be part of the campaign ‘Traces Back’, organised by the networks Youth without Borders and Welcome to Europe (W2EU). The project allowed those who had once passed through the island to trace their first steps in EUrope, to reconnect with friends still ‘stuck’ in Greece, and to come together in protest against the continuous detention of the newly arrived. My research remained in the background of the campaign and merely recounts stories that were narrated at the local radio station of Lesvos, during an exhibition in Mytilene, and to me in order to be subsequently published on the blog ‘Birds of Immigrants’ (2013). The blog is ‘a platform for unaccompanied young refugees on the way to Europe’: Some of the posts are written in Greece, others are posted in some InternetCafe on the run. This page should be a way for young refugees to display their view on Europe and of course all the experiences on their way. For many participants of the ‘Traces Back’ project, Lesvos was a place of traumatising experience, fear, and violence, but also one of encounter, support, hope, and friendship. Most arrived on the island between 2005 and 2010 and many were imprisoned in the notorious Pagani detention centre, described (even) by the Deputy Civil Protection Minister Vougias as ‘Dante’s Inferno’ (UNHCR, 2009). The centre was shut down by the end of 2009, after protests inside and NoBorder activist solidarity outside. Those who returned to this place in 2013 now reside in several EUropean countries, work or go to school, and are allowed to move within the EU, even if only temporarily. Having gone through Greece

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constitutes merely a facet of their lives. They come back as world travellers, those who resisted and survived the EUropean border regime, but inasmuch so as EUropean residents and activists, as students, fathers, friends, carpenters, and cricket-players. The stories of three participants, Jawad, Arash, and Azadi, names they have chosen themselves, who arrived as unaccompanied minors and managed to escape Greece to arrive in relative safety elsewhere, show how they clashed multiple times with EUrope’s delocalised borders and how their lives were put on hold. They had to imagine their futures several times anew but remained unyielding in their will to find a dignified place for them in the world. When they returned to Lesvos in October 2013, as ‘tourists and activists’ according to Jawad, they were shocked to find that a ‘first reception’ centre had opened only weeks earlier on the island, near the small village of Moria, on a former military base. The centre was turned into the first Greek-EUropean hotspot in October 2015, intended not for lengthy incarceration but first identifications of newcomers who would then be transferred to mainland Greece. Following the EU-Turkey deal of March 2016, however, it has morphed into a centre of detention and deportation where, currently, in early 2018, more than seven thousand people – four times as many as its capacity allows – endure in inhumane conditions and for months on end. Back in 2013, the Moria camp was not as securitised as it is today. Referring to it as the detention camp ‘of the Troika’ to incriminate not merely Greece but to stress the ‘EUropeanness’ of this prison for foreigners, about fifty participants of the Traces Back project mobilised a demonstration, loudly stating ‘no to a new Pagani’ in front of the camp (W2EU, 2013). Unexpectedly, we found that its gate was unlocked. Marching inside, we encountered the recently arrived, families with children, as well as many teenagers and young men behind fences. The two guards who emerged panicked, shouted around, and tried to hinder the taking of pictures. They failed to impress – we were too many, they were too few. We talked to the prisoners, shared information material through the holes of the fence, and invited them to stay in our tent camp after their release. For Jawad, Arash, and Azadi, the encounter with the imprisoned was empowering but also difficult, memories of their own incarceration appeared. Released from the Moria centre a few days later, some young Afghans visited our tent camp. Driven by the desire to move on, to enter ‘real EUrope’, they did not want to stay for too long but they seemed glad that their second welcoming to EUrope came with smiles and food, music, and dancing, not incarceration. When we sent them off a few days later at the harbour of Lesvos, we felt torn. They had overcome another obstacle but we knew that much of EUrope’s border labyrinth, experienced by Jawad, Arash, and Azadi years before, was still ahead of them.

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Image 3.1 Group of travellers released from the Moria registration centre join the Traces Back tent camp on Tsamakia beach, Lesvos/Greece, October 2013 Source: Marily Stroux

Jawad Jawad is four years old when he flees war-torn Afghanistan.4 In Iran, his family is subjected to constant harassment, humiliation, and police controls. His father remains in precarious working conditions throughout, unable to send his children to school. Jawad’s family returns to Afghanistan in 2003 only to find that ‘there was no security, still blood, still problems’. A few months later, the family moves back to Iran but the situation does not improve. Jawad decides to flee. EUrope is not his wanted destination, he has never heard of it. After six months of organising, he finds somebody to get him over the border. He leaves Iran and travels through Turkey. From its western shores Jawad and some friends cross the Aegean Sea in 2005. The person who brought us [to the Turkish shore] told us ‘there is a light, this is Greece, until then you have to paddle’. [. . .] From the middle of the distance onwards we had only one paddle. We started at 10pm and arrived at 8am, paddling with hand and foot. Arriving on the Greek island of Lesvos Jawad is chased for the first of many times by the police. They escape but the friends lose each other. He travels to Athens, then Crete. He spends many months in a centre for unaccompanied minors, learns Greek, and becomes the assistant of the interpreter at the centre. When he wants

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to visit his family in Iran and is not allowed to do so, he decides to leave Greece via the coastal city of Patras: ‘One has to hide the whole time. In lorries, beneath lorries, in the time when they stop at traffic lights while the police and racists hunt you.’ Unsuccessful, Jawad leaves Patras, travels back to Athens, and then to Corinth. From there I went to Italy in a lorry on a ferry, two days and nights. I arrived in Venice and went to Austria where the police controlled us and arrested us. They said we would have to go back to Greece. Resisting deportation, Jawad begins a hunger strike at the removal centre that would last for ten days and during which he loses about 15 or 16 kilos. The doctors decided that me and my friends had to be released. But the police tricked us. They told us, you are free, you can go claim asylum. When we went to the administration they brought us food but then two police officers came with handcuffs and said that we would have to return to the prison to be deported. I was so disappointed and the whole world was so dark, I lost my hope. Spending three months in a prison in Vienna, Jawad is prescribed anti-depressants and sleeping pills. I only ate and then went back to sleep. Sometimes I was only up for about two hours per day. The day came when they wanted to bring me to the airport. I refused. There was a radiator in my prison cell. I locked myself behind it so that I could not even get out anymore. They came in and shouted and hit me but I could not leave. When they noticed that they called professional help and they cut me out. Then about ten to twelve police officers came in and beat me up. They put me into a car and brought me to the airport. A few hours later I was back in Athens. Jawad takes a deep breath and struggles before continuing his recollection of being returned to the place that he had successfully escaped. When I arrived, I was not really conscious, I could not think or do anything. I did not want to live anymore. Fortunately, I had a friend here and I met him on the street and he took me back to his home. I sometimes left the house to go for a walk and sometimes I went so far that I did not even know anymore where I was. I also did not care for the cars. I always went to the sea and sat there and looked at the water. I also watched the people next to me and I always wanted to know what the difference was between me and them. What did I do wrong? And why is life so hard for some people? There are so many people here, millions, and the city has such a long history and culture but I am all alone.

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In the following months Jawad works himself out of depression, improves his Greek, finds accommodation, and begins the job as an interpreter back on Lesvos where he spends two years. That was a nice time but I still could not stay in Greece as I was not allowed to travel and meet my family in Iran. I decided to go to Germany. I flew to Germany illegally. I thought I would maybe go back to Mytilene but then I stayed in Germany. I went to school and now I am doing an apprenticeship. I met amazing people who help me. It is like a family, they always support me. And I feel great in Hamburg. Arash Arash lands on Lesvos in 2006, on the 16th of October. The 14-year-old spends a few days in the Pagani detention centre and then leaves for Athens.5 There I stayed for two days and had no place to sleep. I had to sleep in the Alexander Park. I then went to Patras and just wanted to leave. I tried for two weeks to leave but unfortunately it did not work. I decided to go back to Athens. Arash gets in touch with an Afghan acquaintance who lives in Lavrio and moves there for more than three years. ‘In my first year I was not allowed to go to school and I was not allowed to work and I did not receive any help’. Arash’s attempted suicide fails. He enters school in his second year in Lavrio and works on the weekends. Although his situation improves, he decides to leave Greece. I called my sister in Iran to ask for some money. She helped me and somebody took my money and sent me to Italy. After one night there I went straight on to Paris. I spent two weeks in Paris and I tried to learn the language. But I did not like it, both the city and the language. I met a boy from Afghanistan who wanted to go to Sweden and he offered me to come along. I then just went with him but stayed in Hamburg. I registered with the social agency there. I was 17 years old then. [. . .] At the social agency they did not believe that I was 17 years old and they sent me to a doctor to see how old I was. To his surprise, Arash’s age is altered to eighteen. Afterwards the social agency called to tell me that I had to give them my fingerprints. I had already given my fingerprints in Greece and knew what would happen with them. [. . .] I did not want to give my fingerprints and they sent the police. I closed my eyes and out of protest formed fists so that they could not take my fingerprints. Then they suddenly said that I could just leave.

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Arash claims asylum in Germany and is granted the right to stay several months later. Thank God, I received a residency permit [Aufenthaltsgenehmigung]. Right now, I live in Kiel and I have done a language course and I am about to get my school degree. Azadi Azadi told his story in Mytilene on the 11th of October 2013, the day when more than 200 people were left-to-die in the Central Mediterranean Sea (WatchTheMed, 2013).6 It was the 19th of January 2008 when we were at sea and when the coastguards caught us. It was the day of my birthday. I had never seen the sea before and I had great fear to drown. When the boat tips over, how will I save myself? I thought: my god, you brought me on the same day to the world, you will take me away on the same day. Azadi is detained in Pagani where he spends about two weeks. There were 80 people in one room. There were no beds to sleep. I met people who I knew from Istanbul and they gave me some food. It was really dirty, one had to wait for a long time to go to the toilet. Two weeks later they gave us the paper that says that we have to leave the country in 30 days. Able to move on, Azadi travels to Athens where he claims asylum and receives the ‘red card’ proving the asylum application. ‘I was happy that I could go out on the street without being arrested by the police’. A few months later he decides to go back to Lesvos where he stays in a centre for unaccompanied minors for five months. He learns Greek but then has to leave as he has exceeded the centre’s age limit. Azadi hears about the NoBorder activist camp on Lesvos. ‘I read that they were fighting for the rights of refugees and migrants and it was the first time in my life that I saw that people were fighting for something like that’. He becomes an interpreter in the NoBorder camp and is even allowed to enter Pagani: ‘I saw that there were 800 people. I had the red card and could move freely. They could not, which hurt me a lot’. Afterwards, Azadi returns to Athens. It was very difficult in Athens, there were racist attacks, I had a lot of fear and no hope to find work or be allowed to go to school. I decided to leave. I tried it in a lorry once but they caught me. At the airport they caught us again and put us in prison. I managed at the third time to leave Greece. I was in the aircraft and I waited until we took off. Then I called my friend [. . .] and said that now I am gone. [He] was so happy that he broke his mobile phone. Then

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he went outside and cried because he was left behind alone. I was scared that they would catch me in Germany and send me back to Greece. He is not caught and claims asylum. However, the first months in Germany are difficult. Azadi misses his friends, the island, and ‘his love’ in Greece. ‘I decided to go back to Greece, to buy a ticket via France and Italy and then back to Patras’. In the end, he does not leave. He is patient, as he says, and receives asylum in Germany six months later. He now lives and studies in Berlin. Last I heard of Azadi, in summer 2018, he had returned to Greece to visit and support the (migrant) activists who had occupied the City Plaza hotel in spring 2016 and turned it into the ‘best hotel in Europe’, accommodating hundreds of migrant travellers ‘stuck’ in Athens.

The borderscape of Athens A nodal point for those who succeed in entering the Greek mainland, Athens has become an urban site of rest, orientation, temporary employment, and new identities, but also increasingly one of homelessness, hunger, racist attacks, and police harassment. Jawad, Arash, and Azadi passed through the capital city on their journeys and all reported of the ‘difficulties’ they encountered there. In August 2012, under Prime Minister Samaras, who had only months earlier announced to ‘take back our cities’ from ‘illegal immigrants’, the Greek government launched the police operation ‘Xenios Zeus’, first in Athens and two months later also in Patras (Human Rights Watch, 2013). Large-scale police controls based on racial profiling ensued. Named after the Greek god of hospitality, the operation sought to detect ‘illegals’ and fight crime. Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection Dendias held, notably long before the mass migrations of 2015, that Greece would perish due to clandestine migration: Ever since the Dorians’ invasion 4000 years ago, never before has the country been subjected to an invasion of these dimensions [. . .]. [T]his is a bomb on the foundations of the society and the state. (Council of Europe, 2013) The fascist Golden Dawn party, the third strongest political force in Greece, applauded his statement. Seeking to close the ‘barn door’ at its outer borders, the Greek government also attempted to crack down on ‘illegals within’. In less than six months, police forces stopped ‘almost 85,000 people of foreign origin on the streets of Athens [who were] taken to a police station for examination of their identification papers and legal status’ and ‘4,811 [were] arrested for illegal entry and stay in Greece – a criminal offence – and detained pending deportation’ (Human Rights Watch, 2013: 1, 14). Also in 2012, Greece extended the duration of possible incarceration of asylum-seekers in detention centres from three or six to eighteen months (Amnesty International, 2012). The Greek

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Chief of Police suggested that the increased period of incarceration was meant to ‘make their life unbearable’ (Amnesty International, 2013b). The urban space of Athens has its own geographies of fear, with no-go areas for those who do not seem Greek enough, areas known for police sweeps and as strongholds of the Golden Dawn where civil patrols mark their territories by hanging up Greek flags or leaving ‘Greece for Greeks’ messages in public squares. While violent attacks against migrants had already been frequent before, it was in 2012 that the number of racially motivated assaults rose dramatically. In the annual report of the Racist Violence Recording Network (2013), it reads: In many cases victims report the use of weapons during the attacks, such as clubs, crowbars, folding batons, chains, brass knuckles, spray, knives and broken bottles [. . .]. The victims suffer multiple injuries such as fractures, sprains, contusions, lesion injuries, abrasions, eyesight and hearing damages, symptoms of post-traumatic stress, etc. In 2012, 151 of such attacks against migrants were recorded. For Moawia Ahmed (2013, personal communication, 1 November), the Coordinator of the Greek Forum of Migrants, the real number of racially motivated assaults that year was far higher but since the undocumented were afraid of the police or saw this as ‘a normal side of their lives’, much would go unreported. Research notes, Athens A run-down flat somewhere in Athens, Greece. Smoke fills the room; the single window is only slightly ajar. The TV is on, inadvertently drawing my gaze. Or, maybe, allowing me not to meet the many eyes curiously directed at me. Jaser explains that I helped with his papers. Or, at least that is how I interpret the nodding and smiling. I feel uncomfortable. Is this one of these fieldwork situations where I take out my black notebook and ask semi-structured questions? Where I enquire into their lives, their journeys, their experiences of racism and violence, their resistance? A day later, his brother calls me on the phone: ‘Jaser prison, Jaser prison’. At a police station in Athens, again a smoke-filled room but no smiles, no nodding. Jaser was arrested hours earlier, for unknown reasons. ‘Where is he from?’, the police officer asks, pointing at me. ‘Germany’ my friend says, in Greek. They seem unconvinced. One of them rolls a cigarette, not looking up, the other one listens through headphones to music. ‘When will you release Jaser?’, we ask. ‘Soon, go away’. We now know one another. Jaser’s family and I have been to the Doctors of the World together, the migration service, and the police. When one conducts interviews or observations during fieldwork, money should not be offered. There is an ethics of research. A displaced family of Syrian war survivors collects edible remains from the garbage container of the local supermarket and prepares food for

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me. I am their guest of honour, they even buy meat. I give some money, of course. Jaser looks exhausted, he cannot sleep at night. He is afraid that he will run out of cigarettes that help him stay relatively calm. The flat is noisy, hot, cramped. His injured ear is infected, throbbing, reminding him of an unfortunate encounter with a borderguard. I thought I knew him. I cannot reach him on the phone, for days. He has four different numbers. I mention that to a friend, a migrant rights lawyer. She says: he is a smuggler, this is what they do, how they operate. I tell her that’s ridiculous, that she does not know him. But what if? In the flat, with the Greek lawyer, with Jaser. Not a smuggler, my doubts now embarrass me. One of the older women opens up, for the first time. Jaser translates, as always, into German, I translate into English. Her daughter died during their journey, in the Greek region of Evros. She was pushed into the river by a borderguard, her clothes pulled her down into the water. She disappears, drowns, dies. Jaser goes quiet, he cannot translate anymore. For the first time, he hears the story first hand. He covers his face, cries. How often did I make him listen to and translate stories of his family’s suffering? Is this research? Jaser and his family I first meet Jaser in front of the Greek Council for Refugees in Exarcheia, Athens.7 Waiting in line to request an interview with lawyers of the Council, I notice a man in his early thirties who tries several times to draw the attention of the Council’s doorman but fails. Standing quite close to him I can see the pile of documents in his hands. They are all in German, including a card of a German insurance company. I approach him and ask, in German, what he came here for. He turns around, his face lights up, ‘you speak German?’ he asks, ‘Ich bin Jaser’. He says that he has visa problems but that he is a resident of Germany. Detecting my visible confusion, he indicates that this is a longer story. We step aside, leave the queue, and go to a café around the corner. He is eager to tell his story. I have lived in Germany for 17 years and have not seen my family in Syria for 17 years. I asked to see my family in Greece who came due to the war and violence. I came to Athens to hug my family but became convinced that in Greece it is very difficult to live. On the 10th of October 2013 I came via Switzerland to Athens and on the 23rd of October I had to return to Germany. At 11am in the morning I went to the airport in Athens. I got my boarding card and when I went through the police control the police said that my documents were not my documents. They said these papers belonged to somebody else. I asked him to return my papers but he said no. They took me to the police station in the airport and I spent six hours there. In the end they hit my ear really hard. I have witnesses; my cousin and a good friend were there for example. He could not react as he was scared to be arrested. I went to the German embassy but

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I read through the documents, they are issued by the German embassy in Athens in case of lost visa documents. Jaser has difficulties understanding the six pages of complex officialese. Following residence law paragraph 25, Jaser obtained a temporary right to reside in Germany due to humanitarian reasons. His local administration granted his ‘vacation in Greece’ and issued the relevant papers. We try to complete the forms but Jaser’s case is different, there is no box asking for details on loss of visa documents due to police abuse. We take a taxi to the German embassy and together we ask for advice. The embassy staff knows Jaser. He has been here several times before asking for support but was merely handed these documents and told to ask for help at the Greek Council for Refugees. The Council is a special charity offering ‘legal and social advice and services to refugees and people coming from third countries who are entitled to international protection’ (Greek Council for Refugees, 2013). The fact that Jaser does not fall into this category and that the Council is presumably not capable of helping him fill out German visa documents should be blatantly obvious to the German embassy. We indicate that several passages of the form do not apply to his case – the embassy person asks why. Jaser recounts his story, not for the first time. Unimpressed and losing patience, the staff member notes: ‘If the police control migrants they usually fill out a protocol that the migrant then receives’. Surprised, we indicate that the police recording an incident in which they used excessive force, tearing both Jaser’s travel documents and his ear drum, seems unlikely.8 ‘I have not heard of such problems before, he needs to fill out the form saying he lost his visa’. Although the embassy is aware of his right to reside in Germany and has already obtained his details from his local administration, issuing a visa would take a ‘couple of weeks, maybe longer’. Jaser invites me back to the place where his family stays, in the area of Neos Kosmos. The flat is tiny, three rooms for twenty-five people. It is hot and smokefilled. They are all from Syria and came to Greece in the last three years, some as recently as two months earlier. As religious Yazidis they belong to the wider Kurdish community, a non-Muslim minority frequently persecuted, most recently and harrowingly by Islamic State militias in Iraq and Syria. Jaser translates for me and his brother-in-law, Nihad, recounts the story of how Assad’s soldiers came to his house and demanded money. Wanting to escape the constant harassment by Syrian authorities, instead of paying, Nihad decided to flee with his two wives and eight children. They travelled via Turkey and were smuggled into the Evros region in northern Greece. ‘We were just let out in a forest and then caught by the police. We had 30 days to leave the country and stayed at the police station for seven days’. They travelled on to Athens where they slept rough at a playground for a

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few days until they met other Syrians and found a flat. The police evicted them, and again they stayed at the playground. They begged for money, found food in garbage containers and eventually moved into their current flat. Nihad got arrested and stayed in detention for several months: ‘My family ate from the garbage or cooked grass from the forest. Then I was arrested three times and put in prison for three months each time because my papers had expired. [. . .] Now I am scared to leave the house’. Nihad’s recollections come to an end and a relative of his, Ziad, tells the story of how he had fled the war in Syria with his family, only six weeks earlier. In Turkey their fingerprints and passports were taken. First imprisoned and beaten by the police, they were then discarded into a large refugee camp where Ziad’s sister was sexually abused. For thousands of Euros, 300 per child and 600 per adult, his family was taken to northern Greece where Ziad had to leave his parents behind, they were too weak to walk on and they have not heard of them since. We exchange numbers and promise to meet again, two days later, at the Doctors of the World (2013) for health check-ups on some of the children and Jaser’s swollen ear. However, only one day later I get a phone call, ‘Jaser prison, Jaser prison’. Accompanied by a friend who speaks Greek, we hurry to the police station where the police enquire repeatedly about my origin and seem not fully convinced by ‘Germany’. Rolling cigarettes, joking around, and listening to music, their contempt for us is hardly concealed. We seek to explain Jaser’s particular predicament. They seem to know but state that they would have to make some background checks first before releasing him. While an order by the Greek Ministry for Public Order and Citizen’s Protection announced that Syrians would be detained merely for a few days so that their origin could be verified, various cases of arbitrary detention have been revealed in contradistinction to such order (ELENA, 2013). With the assistance of a Greek migrant rights lawyer, Jaser gets out of prison the same night, after having been kafkaesquely imprisoned for not having the documents that the police themselves had taken away from him. In the following weeks Jaser, his family, and I meet frequently, talk to doctors, lawyers, journalists, and activists. Walking down the road, always looking out for the police, Jaser points to ‘the people smugglers’ who had asked whether he wanted to pick up people from the Evros region. ‘Look into my wallet, I have two Euros left and they told me I could earn 2500–3000 Euros by driving up once but I won’t do that, I am not a criminal’. Jaser introduces me to the Yazidi community that has gathered in Neos Kosmos, in some distance to the Muslim Syrian community. In many encounters, I am exposed to the plight of those who escaped war only to live in poverty and social marginalisation – traumatised children, wounded young men, and sick elderly who are unable or unwilling to make use of Greek health services. I meet Nizar, visibly traumatised, whose ten-year-old daughter was raped by smugglers when he could not immediately pay the money they requested. ‘Back in Asia, where we live, so many people die, there is no god. I thought god

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would be in Europe but if he is not here, he does not exist’. Also scared to be arrested, Nizar hardly leaves his small, run-down but overpriced flat. Jaser just wants to leave Greece. His papers, however, are not ready for weeks. Living among his many relatives in their noisy flat causes pain to his injured ear, he is constantly tired and scared to use up all the cigarettes he has left. We meet, once again, in the flat with a lawyer and human rights activist who enquires into the different legal situations of the family members. There are potential cases of family reunification with relatives who already reside in Germany. The question of whether or not to apply for asylum, however, remains irresolvable. A registration would allow family members to move around Athens without becoming arrested and detained but what if they escaped to western EUrope and the deportation-stop to Greece got revoked in a few months or years? Would one trade future uncertainties for a present ability to move more freely in clearly defined bounds, or would one choose a present of insecurity, constant hiding and possible detention, for a potentially less threatening future? A present and future of potential confinement, both folded into the Greek-EUropean asylum regime, leave only unpredictable variables and impossible choices. The lawyer takes note of every case, and then, suddenly, Jaser’s aunt, who had remained silent throughout, starts speaking. Yes, she has a case as well, a case against the Greek state and its borderguards who pushed her child into the Evros River right next to her, drowning and disappearing her soon-to-be-married daughter. Everybody in the flat goes quiet, the older women in the room start sobbing. Jaser has difficulties translating, we have difficulties listening. Cautiously, the lawyer expresses her deep sympathies, hugs the mother. She asks about dates and times, whether the body has been found or not. No, it has not. The Greek state did not search for her but other migrants did. Many, about thirty, travelled up north from Athens to search the river for the body. It remains unfound and obsequies have already taken place both in Germany and Syria. The mother does not want to start legal proceedings. She does not want to mention her daughter again. Jaser escapes Greece about five weeks after his planned departure. This time he is not stopped. He has lost his job in Germany, has trouble with the job centre and his girlfriend who have difficulties believing his story, and he lacks the money to pay the bills that pile up in his flat. But at least he made it out of Greece. He speaks to his family in Athens every day. He tells me in December how his old uncle had died in the tiny flat and for days the police and emergency services refused to pick up his body. They were collecting money to send him to Turkey where his children live precariously. In January 2014, Jaser calls me up, this time with good news: Remember my brother-in-law’s second wife? She left Greece with her mother and two children and is now in Serbia and I expect them to be in Germany in three days. And I have more news. Remember my niece? She arrived in Germany yesterday. She went through Serbia, Romania, and so on, Hungary, you know, but anyways, she is now at mine, at home.

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In May, Jaser informs me that ‘they are all now in Germany, not a single person remains in Greece’.

The borderscape of Patras Patras, considered Greece’s gate to the West due to its history as port of departure for Greek migrants, has been a site of unauthorised crossings to Italy since the mid-1990s. Following the securitisation of the port area in light of increasing arrivals of Afghans and Iraqis in the 2000s, the situation for migrant travellers has become ever-more precarious (Amnesty International, 2010). ‘Both the city and the port are constantly patrolled and monitored by the police and the coastguard’, but, nonetheless, ‘the transient population continues to search for [. . .] new ways to go to Italy’ (Pro Asyl and Greek Council for Refugees, 2012: 9). In most cases, those who come to the coastal city are male, able-bodied, and poor, travelling alone or in small groups, and seek to transit first to Italy, hidden inside trucks and on the ferries that connect to several Italian ports, and then further towards northern EUrope. While a few of the individuals I encountered in 2013 decided to move out of Greece only after they had failed to obtain asylum there, the vast majority had always been determined to go elsewhere. For them, Patras was one of several possible escape routes, but a rather desperate one. Stowed away on trucks and ferries, some had already made it over to Italy, only to experience forcible return back to Greece.9 Scattered migrant camps can be found increasingly around the southern port that opened in 2011. Before, there had been the ‘old factories’ further north, with 300–400 migrant inhabitants, but many were arrested when the Xenios Zeus police operation also came to Patras. In May 2012, a Greek national was killed, allegedly by young Afghans near an occupied factory (Human Rights Watch, 2012). Hundreds of Patras residents and members of the Golden Dawn marched to the factory, seeking to burn it down, their attempt only thwarted by intervening police forces. After the attack, migrants were warned by the police that their safety could not be guaranteed and were urged to leave the city. That these safety concerns were genuine is open to question given that the police themselves have regularly acted as perpetrators of anti-migrant violence. According to Jorgos Papaleonidopoules from the NGO Praksis, the police and port authorities are well known for their cynicism and brutality (2013, personal communication, 7 November). Migrant testimonies speak of physical assaults by the police, including beatings with electroshock batons or even stabbings, being handcuffed for long periods of time without access to water or bathrooms, as well as being subjected to mock executions, racist insults, and humiliation. As a report by Pro Asyl and the Greek Council for Refugees (2012: 15) notes: Complaints often concerned incidents where migrants were forced into the sea, with their clothes on and in freezing weather conditions, to stay in cold water up

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In the ports of Italy, serious rights violations and ill-treatment have been recorded, too, including physical abuse, the destruction of personal belongings and travel documents, interrogations without translators, and the arbitrary modification of documented ages, making minors into adults before deporting them back to Greece. Given these intensely adverse conditions, the transient population of Patras has become smaller. I was told that some have moved back to Athens and others further north to the coastal city of Igoumenitsa to try their luck there. Those who remain, live more scattered and hidden than before, but in close proximity to the port. The (not so) abandoned factory In darkness we enter the factory for the first time. Sneaking through the wooden fence we hope not to be seen by police patrols. Since the opening of the southern port, the factory on the opposite side has become the largest shelter for people on the move, mainly from Afghanistan. I am told that the ‘African factory’ is nearby.

Image 3.2 Factory near the southern port, Patras/Greece, November 2013 Source: Simon Krieger

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My visit was announced and agreed upon beforehand via the solidarity network Kinisi – Motion for the defence of refugees’ and migrants’ rights (2013) in Patras who had reached out to the inhabitants in advance to see if some would be willing to speak to me. A similar arrangement could not be found with the group of SubSaharan travellers, and so I stayed away from their shelter. One of the solidarity activists and a Swiss journalist accompanied me when I entered the factory for the first time. I believe to detect some unease towards our presence when two young men appear to welcome us. I decide, also for the following days, not to take down any notes while I am in the factory. We are told that a few weeks earlier, an Italian camera team had sought to film the factory and its inhabitants, thereby drawing the police’s attention. The film crew was briefly arrested while, so the migrants report, police forces raided the place as ‘punishment’ a few days later. Their presence in the factory is well known to the police, and every incident is used as an excuse for raids. The initial tension fades when I am told that I looked like a member of the Hazara people, the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan of Asian descent, many of whom had fled the Taliban. Others laugh in agreement. I have been mistaken for a Hazara several times before by Afghans, but maybe also by the police who checked on me when walking down the streets of Patras. Accompanied by several inhabitants, we are taken on a tour of the factory, shown where they prepare food, where they play football, and how they hide and escape when police units arrive. There are about forty people in total, among them many minors. We are told that during police raids officers beat them, humiliate them, take away and destroy their belongings. Those who carry ‘red cards’, showing their registration, will be beaten, those who are undocumented will both be beaten and detained. They say that in the previous month, although trying every day, nobody had managed to get onto the lorries and ferries. We climb up a ladder and enter an elevated room where about ten people can sleep at night. They show us, smiling, how they lift the ladder when police forces arrive and then jump out of the back hole in the wall to escape over the railway tracks. On the walls they have hung up prayers written on sheets of paper, as well as images and names of friends who made it out of Greece, depicted as figures clinging onto lorries. We meet many of them again the next day at the NGO Praksis that runs a drop-in centre for unaccompanied minors. Here, if needed, they receive psychological and medical support, one meal a day, and have access to the internet. They invite me to walk back to the factory with them, over the railway tracks to remain unseen. Without an interpreter, communication is difficult. ‘This is my life, going there and back, every day’, says one of the older Afghans, in his late twenties, who has spent ten years in Greece. Climbing over the side-gate, we enter their preliminary home again. Sitting in the corner of the largest hall of the factory, they reveal fragments of their stories. Some have experienced many months of detention, most of them police brutality, and others had already made it out of Greece but were caught by Italian authorities who took away their money, humiliated them,

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and threw their phones into the sea. One young Afghan points to himself, says ‘Dublin’, and recounts in a few English words his deportation odyssey from one EUropean country to the next, ending up back in Greece. Many mention their fear of the Taliban and the lack of prospects in Afghanistan. They also tell me about ‘mum’, a Greek woman who comes into the factory every week with her children and food – unfortunately, we do not meet. I do not conduct interviews, take down names or ages, ask many questions or seek condensed accounts of their experiences. By being invited into the factory, by sharing food, joking around, and playing football together I gain glimpses of their lives. Our guide of the factory starts to collect mobile phones. Their owners slowly disappear, individually or in small groups, while he stays behind. He explains that they are off, seeking to jump onto lorries. Scared of the police stealing or destroying their phones when caught, they leave one of their most valued possessions behind. The solidarity and friendship within the group and the support they give one another is palpable. They all know of friends who made it and are regularly in touch with them, through Facebook, but they also know of many others who are stuck elsewhere in Greece, in Athens or Evros. They even recognise some of their friends and previous travel companions on pictures I had taken on Lesvos a few weeks earlier, in a reception centre for unaccompanied minors, near the village of Agiasos, on top of Mount Olympus. Sometimes referred to as the ‘lost boys’, they remained in the former military base even after the centre officially closed down, walking the halls of the vast, run-down, and ghostly space they still call ‘Villa Azadi’, the villa of freedom.10 The inhabitants of the factory form a community that thrives even in an environment of unwantedness. After merely a few days there I begin to understand why Azadi, feeling lonely after finally arriving in Germany, was about to return to Patras, into poverty and homelessness, but also into a close-knit community of social pariahs. A few days later, when we enter the factory to thank them and say goodbye, we are greeted only by a few. Many had a very long night, they say, trying to escape Greece and are still asleep somewhere. They cook and offer us food. With some we exchange Facebook details. And yes, they tell us with a grin, two made it last night, ‘inshallah’, they are right now in the lorries behind the fence of the port, waiting to board the ferry to Italy.

Lives of infamous migrants Before I went to Greece I read Foucault’s Lives of Infamous Men and I have read it several times since as I felt there were many elements that touched upon the relationship between excess and capture I had sought to explore in GreekEUrope. In this short but significant piece, written in 1977 as a preface to a project that received little recognition when it was published five years later,11 Foucault (1994c: 157) compiles an ‘anthology of existences’, from books and documents

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that tell the stories of ‘[l]ives of a few lines or a few pages, nameless misfortunes and adventures gathered into a handful of words’. He (1994c: 160) writes: I was determined that these texts always be in a relation or, rather, in the greatest possible number of relations with reality: not only that they refer to it, but they be operative within it; that they form part of the dramaturgy of the real; that they constitute the instrument of a retaliation, the weapon of a hatred, an episode in a battle, the gesticulation of a despair or a jealousy, an entreaty or an order. The lives unearthed by Foucault were ordinary, un-famous, never prone by themselves to draw the gaze of authority to them. They turned in-famous only due to a ‘combination of circumstances that [. . .] focused the attention of power and the outburst of its anger on the most obscure individual [. . .], aimed no doubt at suppressing all disorder’ (1994c: 163). The individual’s infamy could stem from an atheist life style, drunken or violent episodes, even from hiding from one’s family, discovered and revealed only due to an unfortunate collision – as it was the case with Mathurin Milan in 1707. His madness has always been to hide from his family, to lead an obscure life in the country, to have lawsuits, to lend usuriously and recklessly, to walk his poor spirit upon unknown paths, and to believe himself capable of the very greatest works. (1994c: 158) It was the encounter with power that illuminated their mundane lives and left a trace, ‘snatched [. . .] from the darkness in which they could, perhaps should, have remained’ (1994c: 161). In his search for the historic texts, Foucault suggests that these ‘particles [were] endowed with an energy all the greater for their being small and difficult to discern’ (1994c: 161). He found them only as they had clashed with authority, for one banal reason or another, and were caught in the nets of the king’s authority. What is known of them are merely the fragments the collisions produced and what remains unknown is how their lives unfolded afterwards. Foucault is certain that ‘without the collision, it’s very unlikely that any word would be there to recall their fleeting trajectory’ (1994c: 171). In his exploration of these lives, Foucault alludes not only to these unfortunate fates but also to those who passed fleetingly by, unencumbered by the king, remaining anonymous and hence seemingly autonomously free. The infamous wo/ men were those who could have been among the ‘billions of existences destined to pass away without a trace’ (1994c: 161). So while they became ‘describable and transcribable, precisely insofar as they were traversed by the mechanisms of a political power’ (1994c: 169), many more did not. It appears that Foucault’s short

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essay is not merely an account of those who were unfortunate enough to collide with the king’s authority but it speaks also of those unspeakable ones who never entered the purview of sovereign control, who remained in the void of history, never documented or accounted for, and who enjoyed a form of freedom found only in anonymity. For Foucault (1994c: 173), whereas before in Western society, everyday life could accede to discourse only if it was traversed and transfigured by the legendary [. . .], [starting] from the seventeenth century, the West saw the emergence of a whole ‘fable’ of obscure life, from which the fabulous was banished. The impossible or the ridiculous ceased to be the condition under which the ordinary could be recounted. One day, he suggests (1994c: 171–172, emphasis added), the theatricality of the clashes between authority and the subjects of infamy subsided, the seemingly omnipotent king disappeared, and [power] would be made up of a fine, differentiated, continuous network, in which the various institutions of the judiciary, the police, medicine, and psychiatry would operate hand in hand [. . .] [and discourse] would develop in a language that would claim to be that of observation and neutrality. This ‘differentiated network’, with which Foucault points to contemporary forms of authority, operates without recourse to the exuberant and comical exchanges of the ‘lettres de cachet’ or the exercise of ceremonious punishments: ‘The commonplace would be analyzed through the efficient but colorless categories of administration, journalism, and science’ (1994c: 172). The simplicity of the absolute authority of the king to pick out, punish, or eliminate has long gone. While the king vanished and a more nuanced (biopolitical) administrative system came into being, clashes between infamous subjects and a zealous power seeking ‘to prevent the feebleminded from walking down unknown paths’ (1994c: 158), persist. There are parallels between Foucault’s figure of the ‘feebleminded’ and contemporary (policy) figures of unauthorised travellers. It is their movement and being that require intervention, examination, and identification. Their unknown paths must become knowable, for in their motion and being seem to lie an unpredictability challenging the mechanisms of political power. Portrayed as contemporary agents of disorder, of conflict, disease, even terror, they compel a vast array of governmental interventions, ranging from their categorisation and criminalisation to their medicalisation and incarceration. In the name of order, their unauthorised movements and paths are sought to be made ‘describable and transcribable’ with the aim to also traverse the subjects of migration with a power of (elusive) control. To that end, current border regimes increasingly infiltrate their targets themselves, not merely by harvesting bodily information, but also by creating border obstacles

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that inscribe themselves as lingering feelings of fear, unrest, precariousness, and trauma onto these contemporary subjects of infamy.

An excess of border violence The migratory trajectories of those I encountered in Greek-EUrope were, more than anything else, turbulent. Never unidirectional, they zig-zagged towards and throughout EUrope. They fled Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran, passed through Turkey and entered Greece where they spent months or years. Jawad, Arash, and Azadi landed on Lesvos, travelled somewhere, learned Greek, found friends and employment or went to school, and sometimes returned to where they had been before. Their migratory ‘turbulence’, ‘evident not only in the multiplicity of paths but also in the unpredictability of the changes associated with these movements’ (Papastergiadis, 2000: 7), traversed various EUropean borders until they reached a place of relative safety, and stayed. Struggling against the imposition of an identity, their movements and reasons for moving were complex, rendering policy figures of ‘the migrant’ a fantasy, a distorted image always in violation of human subjectivity in motion. Azadi’s Greek asylum claim did not turn him into an asylum-seeker. He sought escape, not asylum, his claim was of mere tactical intent allowing him to move more freely and locate possibilities for his eventual flight. Dublin-II determined that Jawad’s future was not to be in Germany but he escaped Greece twice and now works as a carpenter in Hamburg. Arash had also left his fingerprints in Greece. German authorities and doctors ruled that he was eighteen, a manufactured identity. He protested in vain, but successfully resisted fingerprinting by refusing to open his fists. Years later, the three trespassed into a detention facility on the island where they had first arrived and passed their experiences on to those seeking to follow their steps, or at least some of them. Against all odds, Jaser’s family members subverted several EUropean borders by locating ways to flee their precarious situation. Information and resources for fake passports and travel tickets circulated through family and community networks. In my many encounters with the family I was affected by their continuous hope for something I thought was improbable or outright impossible. Continuous messages from Jaser announcing more and more arrivals in Germany, until, finally, the family was nearly completely reunited near the northern German city of Bremen, proved me wrong, as I could see for myself when I visited them in December 2014. Also the individual and collective struggles of the transient community of Patras, a social movement in its own right, continuously challenged the border regime, and by now, many will have made it to western EUrope. Their sociality brought to the fore the relationality that inhabits migratory movements. Subversive knowledges circulated within their community, modern day hoboglyphs warning of the many traps laid out for them. Eluding the forces that wanted to capture and territorialise their bodies, or deterritorialise them through deportation, migratory excess can be detected in all of

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these stories of precarious escape. The ‘most precise and effective tool migrants employ to oppose the individualising, quantifying, policing and representational pressures’, Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos (2008: 217, 219) argue, is to be, or become, imperceptible, which for them stems from the desire to ‘become everybody’: They try to become like everybody else by refusing to be something, by refusing imperatives to become integrated and assimilated into the logic of border administration and cultural control. Migration is the moment when you prefer to say: I prefer not to be. Such politics of imperceptibility, they argue (2008: 78, emphasis added), arises from the tension in a given field between the dominant regime of control and social relations of excess which emerge in that field. Excess is the necessary precondition of imperceptible politics. Conceiving of today’s unauthorised migrations in that way, as ‘new elusive historical actors [who] dwell in the world of imperceptibility and generate a persistent and insatiable surplus of sociability in motion’ (2008: 221), seems to fold into Foucault’s gestures to the excessive freedom of his ‘billions of existences’ who remained untraceably in ‘darkness’. The collisions of those in Greek transit prompt us, however, to rethink some of the underlying assumptions in much of AoM literature concerning the relationship between (migratory) excess and (border) control that seem, at times, more relevant for the times of the king than those of EUrope’s border regime. The often-evoked critique of romanticising tendencies within the AoM seems intimately tied to the ascription of ontological primacy to migration which is, in turn, closely bound up with an understanding of migration as excessive per se and of control as reactionary per se. Nevertheless, having followed those in (arrested) transit, were they not engulfed by an excess of violence, in which their movements became continuously entangled? Similar to the episodes of infamy excavated by Foucault that told not only of individual unfortunate fates but animated also the rationality and functionality of a (historical) political power, the struggles of those in Greek transit point to certain underlying rationales and effects of the EUropean border regime. When I asked Jawad what his idea of EUrope was before his departure, he laughed, he did not know of EUrope: ‘I only knew that one could enter other countries via Iran, that’s all’ (2014, personal communication, 20 April). Even if he had known of EUrope and had applied for a visa, he and the others would not have obtained it. Through the EU visa regime, a tool for the international policing of populations that white-lists some and black-lists many, they were sought to be banned to the local, even prior to contemplating their escape (Van Houtum, 2010). Jawad,

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Arash, and Azadi did not stay where they were supposed to but travelled to Turkey and crossed the sea. Once on mainland Greece, they had entered EUrope’s border labyrinth. Jawad’s first successful attempt to escape Greece brought him to Austria. Waiting with fellow travellers at a bus stop, police forces arrived to arrest them, based on their racialised perceptibility. The Dublin absurdity, moving biometrically inscribed within him, subjected him to detention and inner-EUropean deportation. His hunger strike in an Austrian prison was broken with a false promise, his stubborn resistance met with physical aggression. Years later, in his second successful attempt, Jawad landed in Germany where the border police arrested him – EUrope’s right to free inner movement applies not to all. The three experienced imprisonment as minors, traumatising collisions with police forces, borderguards, and fascist groups, homelessness and hunger, and were accompanied by the constant fear of being returned to Afghanistan. They spoke of how tired they were, physically and mentally, of how the border regime had wasted their time and energy, their youth. Many had suicidal thoughts and suffered from depression. They narrated memories of humiliation, of being treated as less-than-human with enduring disbelief. Jaser’s story, where a resident of Germany travels to Greece as a tourist and is stopped by the police, beaten, and stripped off his documents and rights he had long (formally) held, is certainly not the most common border collision. It sheds light, nonetheless, on the precarity of those considered EUrope’s (internal) others. Jaser’s racialisation as someone not quite EUropean trumped his documented (legal) belonging in Germany. For weeks he became trapped in Athens and had to hide, just like his Syrian relatives had to, for months and years. Instead of being imperceptible, he became highly perceptible as an undocumented migrant. Jaser and his family were not prone to draw the attention of authority to them other than through their racialised appearance that may suggest non-Greek, non-EUropean origins, whatever that means. Seeking to minimise the possibility of clashing with border enforcers, they confined themselves, which meant not accessing the few available medical, legal, and social services, and keeping the children indoors for most of the day. Hiding in a flat did not translate into ‘anonymous freedom’. Afraid and suspicious of everything and everyone Greek, it took several attempts to arrange meetings with Greek lawyers, activists, and doctors.12 Also the transient population of Patras was pushed into social marginality and hiding, but their whereabouts were mostly known. Police authorities raided the factory at will. Many had to leave their fingerprints somewhere along the way that followed and at times pre-empted their movements. Some were registered as (failed) asylum-seekers, ‘visa-shoppers’, former detainees, or criminal offenders. Their suspicion towards journalists, researchers, and activists was a consequence of policing strategies that have sought, with growing effect, to drive wedges between migrant groups and supporters. The fortification of the port area, the erection of ever-higher fences, constant patrols by security forces, devices that can detect

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fluctuations in oxygen levels in vehicles, on-the-ground mirrors reflecting the undersides of lorries to expose unwanted passengers, as well as resentment within the citizenry and a strong fascist presence have turned the city into a violent borderscape where the attempted burning down of a factory was ‘a logical extension of prevailing exclusion, marginalisation, stigmatisation, illegalisation and dehumanization of refugees and migrants’ (Pro Asyl and Greek Council for Refugees, 2012: 5). The impunity in which security forces act, torture, and grotesquely humiliate transitory people also suggests ‘a wider policy of repression and fear [. . .] aimed at discouraging unauthorised migrants and refugees from coming to the port cities’ (2012: 6). Aimed no doubt at suppressing all disorder. Seeing their chances wane, many have left Patras and those who come nonetheless, do so out of desperation. One of the things that focused ‘power’s attention’ to those I encountered in Greek transit, again and again, was their racialised perceptibility. Becoming everyone was not an option. While, in Foucault’s piece, the authority of the king was reinforced through the punishment of supposedly problematic deeds, punishment has become a generalised condition for those travelling while non-white – their racialised otherness a sufficient attribute to draw the border regime’s attention. Infamous already for not belonging to EUrope’s ‘transnational white ethnicity’, their border collisions reveal deeply entrenched imaginaries of who is EUropean in any case (Hansen, 2004; De Genova, 2015a). While certainly also white EUropean individuals may come under suspicion, the Syrian tourist, the Afghan activist, the African passenger is always-already a risky subject. When EUropean whiteness becomes or remains a differentiation function in border enforcement, imperceptibility can translate into self-constraining immobility and into being stuck where one does not want to remain (see Chapter 6). When an idea of migratory autonomy follows Samaddar’s (2005: 9) conception of autonomy as ‘governmentality’s other’, it does not sufficiently acknowledge the pervasiveness of governmental power and underestimates the border regime’s dynamic capacity that operates without (temporal) finality. Instead of the old king’s somewhat theatrically and clumsily reactionary violence, the regime’s punishment and disciplining of unauthorised travellers requires no end point, no final verdict, no task of government is ever fully achieved. As the stories of all those in transit have shown, they were impinged by an elusive violence, putting in doubt the very possibility of an autonomous (migrant) subject when conceived as existing ‘in contradistinction to the existence of the governmental realities of this world’ (Samaddar, 2005: 10). Their experiences were saturated by EUrope’s differentiated network, stretching far out, delocalising and externalising while infesting novel spaces, geographically but also within bodies and minds. EUrope’s proliferating borders suggest that ‘the most intense point of a life [. . .] where it comes up against power, struggles with it, attempts to use its forces and to evade its traps’ (Foucault, 1994c: 162), turns into numerous points of encounter that exhaust those seeking to move on. Those stuck in Greek transit pronounced ‘we prefer not to be’

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uncountable times but were exposed to a situation that seemed to always echo back ‘you already are, have been, and continue to be, so what are you going to do about it?’ Wherever they turned, borders seemed to materialise. There is a productivity to forms of contemporary border control that saturates not only moments of collision between those in transit and border enforcers but also moments of anonymity and imperceptibility. And, in any case, how can one remain imperceptible or become everybody as a large and poor non-white family, who do not speak the local language, whose many children and elderly require constant care? The violence of the border regime, it seems, is also always in excess. Or, maybe, and that’s the hopeful version, through its excessive violence it seeks to progressively arrest what it cannot quite capture. ‘If we had known what happened here in EUrope we would not have come’ was a phrase uttered numerous times. The beating, torturing, raping, killing, and dying does not stop at the gates of EUrope but continues along the external Greek borderscapes and within the urban spaces of Athens and Patras. Does this violence not also function as horror, a force, following François Debrix and Alexander Barder (2012: 19), ‘one cannot escape, one is forced to witness, and that haunts one’s mind, psyche, and body’? Some of Jaser’s extended family members disappeared on their journeys. Elderly parents were left behind and contact was lost. Many experienced brutal and abusive police controls and detention. A young disabled relative was sent via plane and with falsified papers to Italy. We searched for him but he remains missing. A young woman was murdered by Greek borderguards, right beside her mother. Many of the women and children of the family were subjected to sexual harassment and rape. A close relative died in their small flat and his body was not removed, for days tormenting the family and especially the children. What occurs in the force field of EUrope’s border regime is, indeed, horrible but while such form of violence is haunting and deadly for some, it does not necessarily mean that it ‘freezes and stops the body or human action’ (Debrix and Barder, 2012: 19). The many border collisions that the unauthorised travellers endured reveal not merely exclusionary rationales but also the mechanics of subordinate inclusion. De Genova (2015a: 7) suggests that, rather than mere technologies of exclusion, EUropean border practices ‘serve to sort out the most able-bodied, disproportionately favouring the younger, stronger, and healthier among prospective (labour) migrants’. The stories in this chapter point to this productive economy of violence, an endurance test with continuously disciplining effects that produced infamous existences in the first place to then continuously expose them to forms of violence that they sought to flee. They had to flee in flight itself. EUrope’s violent border practices function, it seems, as filters through which those pass who, while scared and scarred, somehow endure. Even their eventual (physical) overcoming of borders did not translate into ‘autonomous’ escape. They continue to be haunted by the horrors others had succumbed to. The violence they experienced travels with them and lingers on, as physical and mental scars, as loss, trauma, despair, or depression.

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In light of such excess in violence, dualisms of anonymous autonomy and capture, perceptibility and imperceptibility, control and escape are put in doubt. Nyers’ (2003: 1090) warning that migratory dissent would always be ‘at risk of being deflected and absorbed by the non-democratic re-takings of sovereign power for the purposes of national and international (re)foundings’, applies also to migratory excess and the risk of violent re-takings by governmental power. Migratory turbulence is confronted by a turbulence of bordering, where the characterisation of the former as disorder and the latter as (reactive) forces of order, does not hold. The experiences of the ‘infamous migrants’ have exposed border enforcement as a force of intense disorder, conditioning zig-zagging migratory trajectories, effortlessly violating laws and (human right) standards, bending rules and categories at will, and imposing truths by manufacturing identities, categorising and re-categorising them, changing documented ages or destroying identity documents altogether. The entanglement of the protagonists of this chapter in the nets of EUropean borders shows how migration and control are co-constituted, how imperceptibility and mobility are ambiguous and can engender multiple forms of violence inasmuch as lines of flight. Instead of remaining attached to a conception of migration as autonomously or ontologically primary, more attention needs to be paid to migration’s entanglement with forms of border control, allowing for a closer interrogation of what forms of human creativity, diversity, and excess are expressed and violated in the process of migration.

Excessive resistance Migratory excess, while inescapably elusive, does emerge in the struggle against the imposition of unwanted identities and unwanted futures. The protagonists of this chapter were driven by despair and the fear to be detained, deported, or drowned, but also by the hope to enter a less violent future, to reconnect with friends and family, to find work, have an education and a place of safety to treat the pain that the journey, and all the reasons for their initial escape, had caused. Although every story is distinct, the will not to remain in their precarious situations was common to all. When Foucault’s infamous wo/men collided with authority, their fates seemed decided, the verdict spoken, punishment immanent. While the forms of punishment that the EUropean border regime has devised for (attempted) transgressions come in many guises, and while Jawad, Jaser, and all the others were hurt and disciplined in one way or another, in most cases, their escape was not precluded. What is certain is that their movements were not those of shadows that fleetingly bypassed the many border practitioners they encountered. They were not Foucault’s billions of lives escaping power but found themselves entangled in a fine and differentiated network – showing how a politics of perceptibility but also one of imperceptibility can be an effect of governmental strategies of border enforcement. The stories of those in Greek transit compel us not to reduce (border)

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control to a re-active force, and (migratory) excess to ontological primacy. They are both more and less. They do not neatly map onto a dichotomously conceived relationship of power and resistance. The entanglement of governmental forces of conduction and migratory counter-conduct suggests that questions around migration’s primacy become less significant, while those of resistance remain central (Johansson and Vinthagen, 2016). What happens during and after collisions with border enforcers is not predetermined but often allows for manifold practices of resisting, appropriating, and behaving-otherwise, even in times of biopolitical population governance. As subjects able to be traumatised and unruly, scared and hopeful, captured and recalcitrant, they found diverse ways to resist, by falsifying identities, taking on new names and stories, buying passports, running away, hiding, by using legal avenues, and by connecting with activist networks. Resistance is practiced not by autonomous subjects, but by those who find themselves deeply entrenched in a governmental regime that does not shy away from employing necropolitical violence. Rather than seeking to find moments and episodes of hopeful anonymity, autonomous escape, or supposed migratory primacy, beginning with their entanglement with border control allows to enquire into this relationship more closely, into all its ambiguity within which protagonists form not figures or spectres but complex individuals. When we move closer to dystopian realisations of a hypermobile world for the privileged few and the accelerated borderisation of the planet for the exploitable many, we need to allow ourselves to understand disobedient movements as political resistances. In order to do so, however, a new vocabulary is needed, one able to capture what often is rendered outside the realm of politics. A lot is then to be gained when we conceptualise resistance in terms of excessive migrations, but migratory excess does not equate or exhaust migrant resistance. Often found in ‘everyday’ struggles over migration, excess constitutes a facet of resistance, often folded into others – modes of dissensual protest and solidarity.

Notes 1 A few portions of this chapters have appeared in my chapter in the Duke volume The Borders of ‘Europe’, edited by De Genova (2017a). 2 This absence of legal recourse was starkly demonstrated when four Greek farmers were acquitted by a Greek court for shooting and wounding dozens of Bangladeshi fruit pickers who had claimed their wages in April 2013. In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of the Bangladeshi migrants, ordering the Greek state to pay damages (Smith, 2017). 3 In December 2016, the European Commission (2016a) announced “the gradual resumption of Dublin transfers to Greece as of 15 March 2017”. At the time of writing (February 2018), this has not yet been implemented. 4 Jawad told me the story on Lesvos in German which I then translated into English for the blog ‘Birds of Immigrants’ – both versions can be found there. We also met again in Hamburg on the 20th of April 2014, where he expanded on some of his experiences. 5 Arash told me the story on Lesvos in German which I then translated into English for the blog ‘Birds of Immigrants’ – both versions can be found there.

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6 Azadi told his story at the exhibition ‘Traces from Lesvos through Europe, Respect only with passport? Muhajer Tour is back’ in Mytilene. He spoke in Greek and was translated into English. I recorded his story there and he subsequently allowed me to re-narrate it. 7 Jaser assured me that I could use his name. I will, however, only use his first name and change the names of his family members. Jaser told me the story twice, first in a café in Exarcheia/Athens on the first day we met, the 29th of October 2014, and again a few days later when I recorded it. I translated it from German to English. 8 Doctors of the ‘Doctors of the World’ confirmed a few days later that the impact of the blow had been severe, requiring further medical care. Jaser underwent surgery after returning to Germany. 9 These summary returns were executed by Italian authorities despite the suspension by most EU member states of Dublin deportations to Greece following the aforementioned MSS v. Belgium and Greece ECtHR ruling of 2011, and in contravention to the reasoning behind the court’s 2012 ruling on Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy (EDAL, 2012). In 2014, in Sharifi and Others v Italy and Greece, the ECtHR found such push-backs to be in violation of several articles of the European Convention of Human Rights (EDAL, 2014). 10 I visited the reception centre in Agiassos on Lesvos three times as part of the ‘Traces Back’ journey and some of its inhabitants joined our tent camp near Mytilene. 11 Together with Arlette Farge, Foucault published a first collection of the lettres de cachet under the title of ‘Le Désordre des familles’ in 1982. The collection received minimal attention and a skeptical reception. Following Farge (quoted in Scurr, 2017), ‘Foucault was deeply saddened and appalled by this rejection and blanket silence’. 12 Once again, the W2EU guide for Greece proved to be invaluable (see Welcome to Europe, 2018).

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Someone who drowns experiences how liquid enters the airways, preventing one from breathing air. Below the water’s surface, she holds her breath voluntarily for some time. But without the ability to take in oxygen and to eliminate carbon dioxide, uncontrolled muscular contractions of the vocal folds ensue. Becoming hypercarbic, hypoxemic, and acidotic, she experiences circulatory arrest, multiple organ dysfunction, and in the absence of rapid intervention and resuscitation, death. Those who are acknowledged as having drowned in the Mediterranean and counted, are not necessarily found in statistics of global drowning victims. According to the World Health Organization’s (2014: 3) first global report on drowning, official data collection excludes incidents ‘where vessels carrying migrants, refugees and stateless people capsize’, because they are regarded as water transport incidents. What is also often not accounted for is what kind of loss this is: ‘death associated with water’, Gaston Bachelard (1999: 6) writes, ‘is more dream-like than death associated with earth: the pain of water is infinite’. Especially disappearances at sea mean a particular kind of cruelty for relatives, friends, and often entire communities. When a body is absent, and hope of return and reunification can persist, common rituals associated with mourning the dead cannot begin. In the Mediterranean space of abjection, the most lethal borderzone in the world, how can solidarities emerge over disappearance and loss?

We hope you will arrive ‘Help’. Seconds later: ‘Sos. Please help us. We have children’ (Alarm Phone, 2015a). We respond: ‘Okay, my friend. Is your engine still working? Can you move?’ They cannot. The engine of the small rubber dinghy refuses to reignite. Many of the fourty-five precarious travellers from Syria, including fifteen children, cannot swim and are exposed to the forces of the Aegean Sea. They drift dangerously within Turkish waters but being returned to mainland Turkey is not an option, they are set on entering EUrope. Half an hour later, they move again, and we receive celebratory WhatsApp emojis, a thumbs-up and a flower.

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We write: ‘Great! I wish you will arrive safe. Inshallah. Please tell me when you arrive, okay?’ Once they pass on their updated GPS position, showing that they have crossed over into Greek waters, we alert the Greek coastguards to the boat and they launch a rescue operation. ‘Are you rescued now?’ The Syrian woman on the boat, Safinaz, confirms their safe arrival a few hours later: ‘Yes . . . thank you dear’, she writes, and sends an emoji blowing a kiss. As one of 2,054 cases of maritime emergency that the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone has dealt with in its first three and a half years in operation, the passengers of this boat made it to the EUropean shore alive and unharmed. They arrived on the 2nd of September 2015 – the very day that Alan Kurdi drowned, the image of his little body washed up on the Turkish shore becoming the symbol of EUrope’s ‘refugee crisis’ (Rygiel, 2016). Safinaz remained in touch per WhatsApp, allowing us to follow her trajectory through EUrope. First stuck on Lesvos Island, ‘a miserable place’ as she wrote, one of waiting and police violence and where the newly arrived ‘just burned the [registration] office’, she moved through the Balkans to Austria and onward to Germany, together with her husband and a Syrian boy she had ‘adopted’ during the journey. While they needed five attempts to cross the Aegean, their movements through EUrope (and Europe) were rapid in contrast to the journeys of Jawad, Arash, Jaser’s family (Chapter 3), and thousands of others who had been stuck in Greece for months or even years. The ‘March of Hope’ that embarked from Keleti train station in Budapest in early September 2015 and thereby opened the Balkan corridor, had cleared the path also for Safinaz and her husband. Or, rather, they were part of the path-clearing, among hundreds of thousands who defeated the EUropean border regime that year by transgressing, irregularly, several borders and by arriving where they wanted to arrive. In Germany, they stayed for a while in the small town of Hofgeismar, a place, as she wrote, ‘suitable for horses . . . cows . . . not for human beings’ – four emojis, crying of laughter (Alarm Phone, 2015a). In July 2017, when we visited Safinaz in another small German town, where she had been relocated to in the meantime, she tells us, in German, that panic had broken out on her boat that day when the engine stopped (Alarm Phone, 2017a). The person next to her had an emergency number with him, scribbled on his arm. She dialled it and reached the Alarm Phone. In this third ethnographic chapter, I chart the emergence of an international solidarity coalition that first formed around the Boats4People campaign in 2012 to protest migrant death at sea, some elements of which then morphed into the Alarm Phone in 2014, an activist hotline for people in distress at sea, able to directly intervene in struggles over mobility played out in maritime spaces. As a campaigner for Boats4People and then as a member of the Alarm Phone, I discuss the significance of solidarity in embodied and (rather) unembodied encounters. When I travelled to Italy in 2012 to participate in Boats4People, I

Migratory solidarity 95 had not decided whether or not to write about the campaign as I then focussed on resistance movements led by non-EUropean migrant groups, such as the Non-Citizens in Germany (Chapter 2). During the journey, however, I began to wonder more closely about the role, importance, and complexity of solidarity in migration struggles. I felt that the encounters between Boats4People campaigners and families of the disappeared, as well as those a few years later between precarious travellers and Alarm Phone activists, raised important questions as to what forms of solidarity can emerge at borders that are meant to separate, not merely along geographical lines. I entitle this chapter ‘Migratory solidarity’, not simply to thematise solidarity in migration struggles, but to also emphasise enactments of transborder solidarity that cannot but be fleeting and momentary – migratory in a sense – where individuals previously unknown to each other have brief, sometimes merely digital encounters. Solidarity, though a crucial aspect of resistance, is often a taken-for-granted assumption in migration activism. Following Natasha King (2016: 52), solidarity could be conceived as ‘mutual support between and within struggles for liberation that seek to change unjust or oppressive social structures’, but with the considerable caveat that those struggling may have very different ideas of what liberation means for them, and how they seek to achieve it. Spatial, political, historical, economic, cultural, gender, linguistic, and other differences often underlie and impact on solidarity attempts, turning questions of power relations, hierarchies, and privilege into central concerns (Mohanty, 2003; Razack, 2007). At the margins, claims to togetherness seem necessarily riven from the very beginning, but are, at the same time, indispensable in the formation of collective transborder resistance. The Non-Citizens in Germany (Chapter 2) and the people in Greek transit (Chapter 3) formed close bonds, often also with ‘local’ activists. In light of surging solidarity efforts in EUrope, in particular during and after the mass migrations of 2015 when an unprecedented number of individuals, activist networks, and non-governmental initiatives emerged to ‘welcome’ and support newcomers, a critical engagement with the idea and practice of solidarity seems called for (Baban and Rygiel, 2017; Schiffauer, Eilert and Rudloff, 2017). How do solidarities materialise in particular spaces of abjection, who are those encountering one another, and what subject positions do they inhabit? What does solidarity between activists and those bearing the brunt of EUrope’s border violence mean, and in what ways does such solidarity constitute resistance? These are some of the interwoven questions explored throughout this chapter by following first the embodied encounters of Boats4People and then the unembodied encounters of the Alarm Phone, both underpinned by the call for freedom of movement for all. Their practices of activism show that at the border, solidarity is necessarily ‘without guarantees’ (Featherstone, 2012: 244) and exposed to the possibility of failure, but also that, maybe therefore, solidarity constitutes an experiment and prefigurative enactment of what a less segregated world may look like.

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Boats4People Why do our children emigrate? Because they do not have a future! They study, they get their diplomas, and nothing happens. They learn a job and then sit around waiting. That is why our poor children emigrate. [. . .] Our sons are the children of the revolution. They started it. They stayed up day and night. Tunisian Woman, name unknown, 2013 Would they bring me my son’s body, I would bury him. I’d know where he is. I cannot spend my life choked up, not seeing my son. Even a body, a skeleton, I need it. Farouk Ben Lhiba, 20131

The Boats4People campaign, composed of activists and NGOs from EUrope and Africa, was the first collective activist attempt to physically venture into the Mediterranean with the aim ‘to end the dying along the maritime borders and to defend the rights of migrants at sea’ (Boats4People, 2012a).2 When first conceived, the campaign was envisioned as an intervention with a fleet of boats, able to support distressed travellers and to monitor EUropean coastguards and Frontex in order to ‘control the immigration controllers’, as activist Nicanor Haon put it (Research Notes, 2012).3 Denouncing the EUropean border regime for its ‘repressive policies which seek to criminalize migration towards Europe more and more each day’ (Boats4People, 2012b), the idea for the campaign had first emerged in summer 2011 as a response to the dramatic increase in migrant deaths at sea. During that time, and for years to come, the turmoil of the Arab Uprisings and their violent aftermaths, but also the renewed democratic fervour and longing especially among younger generations, combined with the inability to travel through ‘regular’ means, prompted many to leave Northern Africa and embark on sea journeys. Crumbling in the wake of revolutionary upheaval, the authoritarian regimes in Libya and Tunisia were no longer able to live up to their role as EUrope’s external frontier guards (Boats4People, 2012c). While about 64,000 people coming from Tunisia and Libya – often referred to as Harraga, ‘those who burn (borders)’ – survived this perilous journey in 2011, more than 1,500 did not arrive (Council of Europe, 2012). Little did we know at the time that this, the deadliest year in the Mediterranean, would be dwarfed in the years of 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017, during which the documented overall death toll soared, standing at 15,486 counted border fatalities. It would, however, also be dwarfed in terms of arrivals: a staggering 1,765,217 sea-arrivals in EUrope were officially recorded over these four years (UNHCR, 2018). In July 2012, Boats4People was launched at the anti-racist conference in Cecina/ Italy where various individuals, activist and migrant groups, as well as NGOs came together. Among them was Father Mussie Zerai, later a nominee for the Nobel peace prize and close collaborator of the Alarm Phone. His mobile phone had long formed a private alarm hotline, circulated ‘among Europe-bound Africans like a Mediterranean 911’ (Schwartz, 2014), leading to the rescue of about 150,000 people, following his own calculations. Survivors of the notorious ‘Left-to-Die’

Migratory solidarity 97 incident from 2011 joined, whose ill-fated odyssey had not taken them to EUrope as planned but washed them back up on Libya’s shore after two weeks at sea, leaving only nine of seventy-two people alive. Despite being detected by various vessels and a helicopter, no one had come to their aid. Part of the meeting in Cecina were also Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani (2012) whose research into the ‘Left-to-Die’ case had prompted the creation of ‘WatchTheMed’, an online monitoring platform intended to bring to light violations of migrant rights at sea. They hoped that through Boats4People, WatchTheMed would become a participatory tool operated by a variety of activists, able to collectivise a ‘right to look’, so as ‘to tell the story that the government of migration does not want to tell or to draw the map that the government of migration does not want to draw’ (Pezzani, 2014, personal communication, 19 March). In the end, instead of the envisioned activist fleet, it was only a single sailing boat, the Oloferne, that embarked on the journey on the 7th of July 2012. A small group of activists boarded the boat and travelled to Palermo in Italy, Monastir and Ksibet El Mediouni in Tunisia, and finally to the island of Lampedusa, carrying survival rations in case of encounters with migrant boats. Farouk Ben Lhiba, spokesperson for the families of the disappeared, whose own son had vanished when trying to emigrate, was one of the activists on board, and many others followed the Oloferne by different means of transport. On land, they turned the different stages into sites of political intervention by organising commemorations and demonstrations, visiting the detention centre Milo in Italy and the Tunisian Choucha camp close to the border to Libya, and by establishing new connections with migrant groups and local solidarity networks in order to strive ‘for a Mediterranean that will become a place of solidarity and cease to be a mass grave for migrants’ (Boats4People, 2012d). While the underlying idea of the campaign was a physical intervention into the Mediterranean, intended ‘to show presence in the space where struggles do take place’, as activist Christoph Arndt recalled (2014, personal communication, 7 March), Boats4People was ultimately unable to create a real and lasting presence in maritime space and its voyage remained largely symbolic, not least due to a lack of financial resources. Nonetheless, new ties were formed in important encounters between (migrant) activists and groups from both sides of the Mediterranean, underpinned by the desire to contest EUrope’s deployment of the sea as the ultimate barrier to unauthorised transcontinental mobility from Africa. With Boats4People, the idea of a more direct maritime intervention emerged, planting the seed for a movement that would later realise this ambitious goal, not with a fleet of boats, but through a phone. Where we might yet be going In Italy and Tunisia, Boats4People campaigners and parents of the disappeared encountered one another. Mainly Tunisian mothers came to Palermo to compel the

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Italian government to investigate the circumstances of their sons’ disappearance and Boats4People supported their protests also in Tunisia to pressurise its government to release the few available information about their children’s attempted sea crossing. In these encounters, and as always in solidarity activism, questions of subjectivity, positionality, and privilege, thus ultimately questions concerning power relations and hierarchies emerged. In workshops, Boats4People activists had been prepared for difficult moments that demanded awareness of the parents’ enduring hope to find signs of survival. There had been past incidents where, facing distraught and traumatised parents, activists had promised to search for the disappeared, which both renewed the parents’ hope and burdened the activists with a nearly unfeasible task. One activist recalled an encounter, during which a Tunisian mother demanded answers: ‘You Europeans know the truth, do you know something about my child?’ (Research Notes, 2012). The situation that brought together those who suffered and those who came in solidarity seemed to straightforwardly assign helper roles to activists, many of whom were citizens of EUrope, and victim roles to those who had come for answers, whose sons had sought to come to EUrope, to ‘us’.4 Meeting the parents’ desperation was a difficult task, with mothers ceaselessly pointing to, and us looking at, and sometimes looking away from, large photographs showing faces of their sons that offered glimpses of a past, a time before they had left and embarked on these boats. Activist Hagen Kopp (2014, personal communication, 12 March) recalled: Of course, it was difficult as it was a time when many of the mothers still had hope that their sons would reappear and some of the mothers were convinced to have seen their sons on Italian television, alive, and could or would not believe that they had died and disappeared somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. So for them it was even harder than for those who could bury the bodies of their children and mourn for them. Clinging onto the faint chance that, even after many months, their sons were still alive, still somewhere but simply unable or unwilling to get in touch with their families, little could be offered but helpless gestures. Thinking back to these moments, Nina Perkowski (2014, personal communication, 19 March) noted: Encountering the mothers was challenging, already due to language difficulties but also due to the understandable emotional involvement of the families. I think the exchange was very important but at the same time it was difficult to realise how little I could do to alleviate the uncertainty and suffering of the mothers and fathers. Now, several years later, many of these families still wait, still hope – Boats4People activists were not able to provide answers. Other families have come to share

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Image 4.1 Protest of the mothers of the disappeared, Tunis/Tunisia, December 2011 Source: Leona Goldstein

their fate, in particular following the tragedies on the 8th of October 2017 and the 2nd of June 2018, when far more than a hundred young Tunisian Harraga drowned (Alarm Phone, 2017b and 2018). So, why the emphasis here on an instance of solidarity activism that, ultimately, failed to offer what was the most desperately needed – clarity about the disappeared children of the revolution? In Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed asks to look more closely at what occurs in situations of encounter. For her, encounters with others are ‘ontologically prior to the question of ontology (the question of the being who encounters)’, and open up existential questions: ‘These others cannot be simply relegated to the outside: given that the subject comes into existence as an entity only through encounters with others, then the subject’s existence cannot be separated from the others who are encountered’ (Ahmed, 2000: 7). The encounter, she holds, is never stable and predictable but marked by (the potential for) surprise and conflict – its ‘strangeness’ is ‘premised on the absence of a knowledge that would allow one to control the encounter, or to predict its outcome’ (2000: 8). When at least two individuals come together, their encounter is framed and mediated by larger social processes and structures that surpass the here and now. And yet, there is a particularity to every encounter: ‘encounters between embodied subjects always hesitate between the domain of the particular – the face to face of this encounter – and the general – the framing of the encounter by broader relationships of power and antagonism’. Who, then, are these embodied subjects encountering one another? Ahmed (2000: 144) suggests that introducing the particular to face-to-face encounters does not imply

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gaining ‘access to the individual expression of the “real” of her body’. Particularity cannot just be read into these moments as that would ‘[locate] the particular in the present moment (or present body), and hence [associate] the particular with the here and now (with what I am faced with)’ (2000: 8). Instead, she (2000: 145, emphases in original) seeks to move to modes of encounter that enquire into the temporal and spatial circumstances that mediate encounters: We could ask, not only what made this encounter possible (its historicity), but also what does it make possible, what futures might it open up? [. . .] We need to ask, not only how did we arrive here, at this particular place, but how is this arrival linked to other places, to an elsewhere that is not simply absent or present? We also need to consider how the here-ness of this encounter might affect where we might yet be going. Conceiving Boats4People solidarity through modes of encounter means attuning to the particular and the general, the factors that enabled and conditioned the encounters, their historicity, as well as their futurity, the question whether the coming-together entailed more than the momentary crossing of paths. Boats4People campaigners did not have the answers the parents longed for the most. Our mutual unknowing of what had occurred to their children meant that hope could not be offered, that hope could even lead to more suffering, but also, that it could not be taken. And despite cautiously treading this line, at times, friction appeared. As activist Christoph recounted: There was this incident where relatives of the disappeared entered an event organised by Boats4People and WatchTheMed. One of us tried to explain that the project was looking into how to change the situation in the future, but when he said ‘future’, the relatives of the disappeared all got up and left the room. For them, the fact that people were discussing the future meant that the past, and their children, were forgotten or not of interest anymore. The encounters between parents and activists were the consequence, before anything else, of the disappearance of their children. It was their disappearance that brought us together but it was also their absence that could not but keep families and campaigners apart. The very reason for the encounter rendered attempts to imagine future trajectories uncertain and made the question of ‘where we might yet be going’ difficult to even pose, which meant that despite attempts of forming a connected struggle, an impasse necessarily remained. Activist Nina noted: It was not necessarily a common political struggle throughout but the families’ personal struggle that is somehow interwoven with our political struggle. This is fine, important, and anyways unavoidable, there just are those who are directly affected and those who are in solidarity, but it can, of course, also complicate collective action.

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Image 4.2 WatchTheMed event at the World Social Forum, Tunis/Tunisia, 2013 Source: Leona Goldstein

How do solidarity and the encounter relate, especially when the encounter materialised as a response to someone else’s disappearance? What does it mean to be together despite difference, when one leaves the realm of easily assumed political and ideological commonness and readability of one another? In other words, what does solidarity mean or become when unity as the groundwork for political struggle cannot be assumed? Solidarity in embodied encounters It seems that when it comes to transborder solidarity, one is required to move beyond the conception of solidarity as simply the standing together of the likeminded, who, easily legible to one another have united to pursue their common interests based upon shared political values, experience, and goals – the premise of much of social movement scholarship. Rather, solidarity at and despite the border can be thought of, following Rancière (1992: 62), as the coming and ‘being together to the extent that we are in between – between names, identities, cultures’. The face-to-face encounters of Boats4People activists with the parents were attempts of an impossible identification, to use a Rancièrean notion he employs in his definition of heterology (Chapter 2), referring to forms of political subjectivisation in which ‘right names’ assigned by the dominant consensual order are refused: ‘the logic of subjectivization always entails an impossible identification’. Involving ‘a process

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of disidentification or declassification’, a heterological politics seeks a cross-identity, a process, it seems, that must always remain incomplete, leaving the subject in in-between spaces without identitarian stability, always exposed to difference and conflict (Rancière, 1992: 61). Providing an example of an always impossible but nonetheless significant attempt to identify and dis-identify, Rancière (emphasis in original) writes: to take a personal example, for my generation politics in France relied on an impossible identification – an identification with the bodies of the Algerians beaten to death and thrown into the Seine by the French police, in the name of the French people, in October 1961. We could not identify with those Algerians, but we could question our identification with the ‘French people’ in whose name they had been murdered. That is to say, we could act as political subjects in the interval or the gap between two identities, neither of which we could assume. Such acts of impossible identification do not imply the process of becoming or embodying an other, and certainly do not constitute a turning inward to oneself in the attempt to secure some form of identitarian stability. Rather, the process of identification entails continuous uncomfortable movement in a struggle towards political subjectivities forged by a new name, a ‘cross name’. Following Rancière, this struggle seems saturated by an impossibility: the distance to the ‘dead bodies’ of the Algerians could never be bridged. The privileges attached to being a (white) ‘French citizen’ were not, and could not be, abandoned in attempts to identify with those murdered ‘non-citizens’. Activist Hagen emphasised this difficulty of finding ‘common ground’ between those directly affected such as the families of the disappeared and ‘Western’ activists: I think that there is a difference between supporting activists who decide to engage due to their political conviction and those who are directly affected, who seek to organise in these situations. But I am convinced that through common activities and by thinking about how a commonly organised decisionmaking process can look like, these categories can be progressively dissolved, although it of course remains important to be conscious of the differences, our privilege [. . .]. So it is about a form of solidarity that should not deny these differences but that nonetheless seeks to create common struggles and structures, to be in regular exchange. The campaign that connected the Tunisian parents’ personal-political struggles with those of the activists was never premised upon an assumedly common identity or the same idea of what ‘liberation’ may mean to those involved. The differences, structures of racialised violence that expose only some to disappearance and death,

Migratory solidarity 103 could never be erased. The struggles were nevertheless tied together in that it was the continuous loss at the border that needed ‘us’ to come together, to listen to the parents’ pain and demands, to not forget what suffering EUrope’s borders entail for certain individuals and entire communities, in the name of the EUropean people. The protest of general and particular pains in embodied encounters did not make the families, nor us, fully readable to one another. Neither marked by ‘otherness’ in their entirety, nor as ‘particular others’ fully understandable and known, the encounters meant one’s exposure to an other and the other’s exposure to oneself. In the interviews I conducted with Boats4People activists, many responded to the question of what prompted their activism by stating that they felt the fundamental injustice underlying the disappearances needed to be addressed, needed a response. For Ahmed (2000: 147, emphases in original), To be responsible for the other is also, at the same time, to respond to the other, to speak to her, and to have an encounter in which something takes place. While responsibility is infinite – and cannot be satisfied in the present encounter – to respond is to be in the order of the finite and the particular. We need to recognise the infinite nature of responsibility, but the finite and particular circumstances in which I am called on to respond to others. It was the families’ suffering and EUrope’s continuous border violence that required a response, that needed ‘us’ to meet, to invent and foster connections. This form of solidarity also always implies the possibility of not coming together and breaking down, a horizon of failure (see Stierl, 2016a). Solidarity conceived as something that may fail is discomforting as it leaves the realm of easily assumed political and ideological commonality and necessitates a challenge to one’s grounding that becomes destabilised through the encounter with an other. However, as Ahmed (2004: 189) notes, incongruence of life worlds does not necessarily hinder the formation of common struggles: Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground. The encounters in Italy and Tunisia were transversal encounters, carrying traces of the past and the beyond. The families of the disappeared had suffered the loss of their irreplaceable sons, a particular loss conditioned, however, by a general economy of violence that abandons and disappears and that creates asymmetrical experiences of violence for racialised individuals and people. Forming interwoven solidarities, we protested the differential distribution of vulnerability,

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acknowledging both radical inequality as well as the fact that precariousness remains a shared human condition. As Butler (2009: 14) notes: Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all. Reciprocally, it implies being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others, most of whom remain anonymous. Seven years on, the families continue to search for their children. Disillusioned by the many failed promises made by politicians and others, including NGOs and activists, they have decided to share their stories directly with the world, through the website Missing at Borders, supported by the Alarm Phone (2017a: 3): The webpage will collect video recordings of the migrants’ families in an effort to give an identity to each of the lost lives, and to publicize and support the struggle of these families as they fight for truth and justice. Boats4People never succeeded to establish a presence in the Mediterranean as envisioned, and the emphasis and temporality of struggle shifted. Following encounters with the families of the disappeared, and being exposed to their immediate

Image 4.3 Boats4People memorial at the Waterfront in Palermo/Italy, July 2012 Source: Leona Goldstein

Migratory solidarity 105 needs and questions, Boats4People sought to offer support in their quest to find answers. In May 2017, Boats4People (2017: 4) published an information guide in five languages, ‘for families who believe a loved one may have perished crossing the Mediterranean to Italy, and for the individuals or associations assisting them in their search’.

The WatchTheMed Alarm Phone When Safinaz reached out to us Alarm Phone activists from a boat in the Aegean Sea in September 2015, the long summer of migration was in full swing. Hundreds of thousands would follow her and by the end of the year, more than 850,000 people had crossed the sea to arrive in Greece, without authorisation. Some nights, dozens of calls reached us, and in the last week of October alone, the deadliest week in the Aegean that year with more than 100 counted fatalities, we were involved in as many emergency situations at sea (Alarm Phone, 2015b). I have written in the past about the Alarm Phone project (Stierl, 2015 and 2016b), and yet, every account can offer only a glimpse into the experiences we have made, and continue to make, having already supported tens of thousands of travellers in more than 2,000 emergency situations. Boats4People was an important stepping stone towards the Alarm Phone. Even if the campaign remained often symbolic and while the coalition of activists and NGOs was never fully harmonious, it opened up new avenues for cooperation across the Mediterranean space. Many of those who would come to compose the Alarm Phone had long struggled in migrant rights, noborder, and anti-racist movements in EUrope, Turkey, Africa, and elsewhere, and were keen to assemble their capabilities and expertise for a concerted response to mass dying at sea in form of an actual, if unembodied, presence in maritime space.5 Recognising the phone’s significance and indispensability for unauthorised migration, functioning as connection, orientation, and support device, a rather novel form of transborder activism emerged, one centring around networks connected through mobile lines of communication. The need for an alternative emergency hotline was dramatically demonstrated when a boat capsized in the Central Mediterranean on the 11th of October 2013, merely eight days after the devastating shipwreck near Lampedusa with more than 360 fatalities. Calling from the boat, passenger Dr Mohanad Jammo had reached out to the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome, only to be told to call the Maltese authorities: He [the Italian official] said to me: you are in an area due to the Maltese forces, not to us. You have to call the Maltese navy. I said to him please we are dying. [. . .] You can call the Maltese forces and I will give you the number now: 00356 . . . (Gatti, 2013; WatchTheMed, 2013)

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In quarrels between the authorities in Rome and the Armed Forces of Malta over who would take responsibility to coordinate the rescue operation, time was lost and rescue efforts delayed. The vessel capsized, leaving more than 200 people dead, including Dr Jammo’s two little sons. Despite the testimonies of survivors as well as research conducted by investigative journalist Fabrizio Gatti (2017), exposing the consciously created delay, an investigation by an Italian prosecutor was closed in April 2017, only to be opened again shortly afterwards, when recordings of the conversation between Dr Jammo and the MRCC Rome were leaked. In October 2014, on the first anniversary of this shipwreck, and supported by Dr Jammo, the Alarm Phone project was launched, raising the following question: What would have happened if the boat-people could have directed a second call to an independent phone-hotline through which a team of civil society members could raise alarm and put immediate pressure on authorities to rescue? (Alarm Phone, 2014a) Since then, the roughly 130 activists of the Alarm Phone have supported precarious travellers at sea. Utilising a management software, distress calls can be re-routed to a vast number of operating shift teams, situated in about 13 countries, thus ensuring that every call is attended to. Instead of high-tech and remote sensing technologies, the connection to simple mobile, smart, and satellite phones has allowed the activists to tap into migration conceived ‘as a multidirectional, dynamic movement, that is, a networked building system facilitated to a great extent by information and communication technologies’ (Andoni and Oiarzabal, 2010: 5). The sea-scape of the Mediterranean, however, does not allow for a one-sizefits-all emergency response. Given the complexity of sea travel, specific but constantly evolving emergency handbooks offering guidelines to the activists had to be drafted for the three Mediterranean regions, a process significantly shaped by accounts of those who had only recently survived sea-crossings. A range of factors specific to the regions had to be taken into consideration, including some of the following: varying meteorological and geographical conditions, intensities of (commercial) maritime traffic, and modes of irregularised travelling. While some journeys are self-organised or are planned and at times executed by local ‘entrepreneurs’ who respond to the (sudden) demand for transborder facilitation, others are arranged by long-standing ‘professional’ networks, or gangs and militias engaged in the smuggling of humans. Also depending on the places of departure, the type, build, and size of migrant boats vary, many have (malfunctioning) engines, some carry only paddles. Given the different routes chosen by particular migrant groups, languages spoken in the three main maritime regions differ as well, ranging from French and English to Arabic, Tigrinya, Urdu, Farsi, Amharic, and others. Moreover, not all regions of the Mediterranean are monitored and militarised to the same extent and only in some are non-governmental witnesses present. Subject

Migratory solidarity 107 to constant processes of negotiation and re-negotiation, degrees of policing at sea often depend on the state of collaboration between EUropean, Turkish, and North African authorities, making interceptions in and expulsions to non-EUropean territories in some areas more likely than in others. What is more, the willingness of (national) authorities to respond to distress calls and adhere to the laws of the sea and human rights conventions also vary, as does the level of violence employed by those who are set on deterring, ranging from maritime abandonment of migrant boats while in sight, non-assistance or delayed intervention, to active push-backs, the stabbing of plastic boats, direct physical assaults of travellers, and robberies at gunpoint. Given this complexity, in order to understand the work of the Alarm Phone in the three regions of the Mediterranean, the following three sections offer brief accounts of how groups of travellers, coming mainly via Libya (Central Mediterranean), Turkey (Aegean Sea), and Morocco (Western Mediterranean), use the phone as the device to make their demands for safe arrival audible. The Central Mediterranean route, 193 distress cases For years it was common that a satellite phone accompanied precarious travellers who, embarking mostly from Libya but also from Tunisia or Egypt, sought to cross the by far deadliest stretch through the Central Mediterranean. Without regular mobile phone coverage in this area of the sea, the satellite phone is the device used to reach out for help, often able to transmit the precise location of the boat. More recently, satellite phones have become scarcer and if present at all, are regularly kept by those whose service as inexperienced ‘captains’ often exempts them from paying for their crossing. Once rescue is presumed to be immanent or search and rescue assets in sight, the phone is thrown overboard by the driver, so as to avoid allegations of being the one ‘in charge’ or even the smuggler himself. This risky practice had left the passengers of the ‘Left-to-Die’ boat in 2011 without their only option to relay their emergency, after those they considered rescuers had repeatedly abandoned them. Depending also on the points of departure along the Libyan coast, the boats carry differently sized groups, often between 100 and 200 but at times more than 500 people, predominantly from Sub-Sahara Africa, but also from elsewhere, Syria, Palestine, even Bangladesh. Following in particular the aforementioned 3rd of October 2013 shipwreck, the Central Mediterranean borderzone has seen a marked increase in actors intervening in this space, though with divergent agendas and mandates. The Italian militaryhumanitarian Mare Nostrum operation, the largest of its kind and able to rescue more than 130,000 people within a year, ceased to exist in October 2014 – falsely denounced for being a ‘pull factor’ for migrants and lacking support among EU institutions and member states (Pezzani and Heller, 2016). Through the Frontex operation Triton, launched in November 2014 with a focus on border control and surveillance in a smaller operational area than Mare Nostrum, and the EU’s Eunavfor

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Med military operation, launched in July 2015 with the aim ‘to disrupt the business model of human smuggling and trafficking networks’, dozens of surface vessels and aerial assets have entered the Central Mediterranean (EU External Action, 2016). In addition, from August 2014 onward, about a dozen humanitarian rescue forces have begun to enter the waters near the Libyan coast, composing a non-governmental fleet with the sole mission to rescue and transfer distressed travellers to EUrope (Cuttitta, 2018; Perkowski, 2016). In light of ongoing criminalisation and de-legitimisation campaigns, the number of non-governmental rescuers has decreased, to merely four in May 2018. Nonetheless, with Northern African navies and coastguards in the mix, including Libyan units trained by Eunavfor Med, as well as commercial cargo vessels, the Central Mediterranean has evolved into a complex borderzone, criss-crossed not only by migrant boats but a wide range of actors with conflicting intentions. Unlike in Turkey, Tunisia, or Morocco, where Alarm Phone members and allies live or have travelled to in order to spread information about the activist hotline and, more generally, about safety and risks at sea, the disastrous security situation in Libya has not allowed for similar activities, except for a brief visit of Zuwarah in north-western Libya. Nonetheless, nearly 200 emergency cases have reached us, the great majority passed on by Father Zerai, often the first to be notified by (East African) travellers at sea. On the 26th of May 2016, however, it was different. At 5.25am Central European Time, a satellite phone call from the Central Mediterranean reached our shift team directly (Alarm Phone, 2016a). The Arabic-speaking man was difficult to hear, but we could discern that he spoke of two large boats that had left Libya. The Italian coastguards were notified, he said, but had not reacted to their pleas. For some time afterwards, we were unable to reconnect to the boat and decided to inform MRCC Rome, the authority that, for the time being, coordinates rescue operations in that area of the sea. They knew of the boat in distress but had no GPS coordinates. As we noted in our Alarm Phone log-book, after repeated conversations with the man on board: 6.21am: We received their coordinates. The man is in panic and says they are about to sink. There are two boats, one boat is in a bad condition. (Alarm Phone, 2016b) Besides updating the MRCC Rome about the location of the boat, we also reached out to the humanitarian crews of rescue vessels, to see whether they could assist. Regularly monitoring and at times uploading the satellite phone on the boat with credit, we remained in touch with the man who then told us about the sighting of a third boat, carrying thirty-five people. In the meantime, the Maltese coastguards informed us that while they knew of the distress situation, they were overstretched, given that at least seventeen other vessels were in distress off the coast of Libya. In our log-book, it said: 8:23am: the people on the boats called and told us, one of the big wooden boats is cracking and water started to fill the boat. In total there are around 1,030 people on the three boats.

Migratory solidarity 109 Our contact person on board asked us to also alert the Libyan coastguard, a rare request only made in the most urgent emergency situations. The Libyans were unreachable and so we informed the Tunisian authorities instead. The boat with our contact person on board was pulling the other large boat with a rope, also carrying several hundred passengers. Following his account, the towed boat had begun to capsize, with many falling into the water. The sinking vessel dragged down the boat he was on, leaving the passengers no choice but to cut through the tow. 8:45am: the people on the boat are calling, they told us one of the boats just sank, 500 people are in the water and many already died . . . Searching vessel-tracking websites for any assets in their vicinity, we contacted the Augusta Offshore Company and found out that one of their vessels had been ordered by MRCC Rome to conduct a rescue operation. Some of those who could swim made it from the capsized boat to the one intact, but when, hours later, rescue assets reached the location, many lives had already been lost. Our communication with the man on board broke off, presumably due to an ongoing rescue operation, and in the early evening, MRCC Rome confirmed the rescue of the boat but refused to inform us about the one that had capsized. Through the humanitarians of SeaWatch we then learned that several bodies had already been found, close to the GPS position that we had forwarded hours earlier. Expecting the worst, it was after the survivors’ disembarkation in Italy that our fears were confirmed. Hundreds, possibly up to 550 people had lost their lives. In our report on the case, we wrote: Europe, these are your deaths. Once again you have turned the sea into a deadly deterrent. You will again blame the smugglers for these fatalities but we know that they are only a direct effect of your policies, an industry that you keep subsidizing. We will struggle on to counter your policies of deterrence, leaving-to-die and abandonment: Ferries not Frontex! (Alarm Phone, 2016b) By the end of May 2016, more than 1,100 people had drowned in the Mediterranean, within the single month. The Eastern Mediterranean route, 1,582 distress cases In the Aegean Sea, not satellite phones but several smart phones are commonly carried on board of rubber dinghies or small yachts that leave from the Turkish coast, attempting to reach one of the many Greek islands. With network coverage given nearly throughout this maritime area, smart phones function as a crucial medium for immediate information transfer: GPS locations can be forwarded via WhatsApp, distress situations made public via Facebook, and borderguard violence documented and swiftly passed on. The vast majority of the 1,582 cases that

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the Alarm Phone has dealt with in this region were not direct calls on our hotline, but distress messages received through these different channels, at times passed on by relatives of the travellers but more often by ad hoc or more structured networks, composed of Syrian and Iraqi activists, many of whom had survived sea-crossings themselves. Situated in a variety of EUropean and non-EUropean locations, they would themselves form rescue networks and connect to others, digitally. The sizes of groups embarking together in the Aegean vary, but are usually smaller than in the Central Mediterranean and more diverse in terms of gender and age, including large numbers of women, children, and the elderly. Those steering the boats are either ‘(semi-)professionals’ or ‘escapees’, though in the months of 2015 and early 2016 when hundreds of boats came and crossings were organised more in the open, it was mostly the latter. The distances between Greek and Turkish shores are a fraction of those between Libya and Italy, and still hundreds of lives have been lost here. In bad weather conditions, with rough waters and strong currents, overcrowded rubber dinghies easily topple over. Cynically, another source of danger are coastguards themselves, or rather certain units within the Greek coastguards who would, as repeatedly documented by the Alarm Phone (2015c), Human Rights Watch (2015), and others, attack migrant boats by disenabling their engines, at times puncturing the rubber dinghies, beating passengers and stealing valuables, before disappearing and leaving them behind in Turkish waters. Even for those who make it to Greek land, the odyssey is often far from over. Stranding on uninhabited islands, tens of thousands had to spend hours, sometimes days, in difficult conditions until they were found and transferred to other islands. Due to increased collaborations between Greek, EUropean, Turkish, and NATO forces, one of the consequences of the EU-Turkey deal from March 2016, the Aegean ceased to be the main liquid gateway to EUrope. Whereas the Turkish coastguards had confronted their Greek counterparts as recently as November 2015 with released footage showing Greek authorities deliberately trying to sink a migrant boat, asking them ‘to refrain from such acts’ (Withnall, 2015), their relationship has improved post-deal. The Turkish authorities now have an incentive to intercept and return migrant boats. In order to guarantee that the terms of the deal are upheld, Frontex and NATO forces roam the Aegean, often relaying sightings of boats to the Turkish coastguards which would in turn conduct interceptions. Experiences of failed crossings and the awareness that thousands remain stuck in Greece after successful crossings have circulated among migrant communities, causing greater hesitation to invest considerable sums of money in what might quite possibly turn into several costly and dangerous attempts to cross, maybe only to end up in EUrope’s overcrowded hotspot-detention centres on the Greek islands. In this context of militaristic mobility governance, and trans- and supra-nationally coordinated deterrence efforts, every migrant boat leaving Turkish shores is nothing short of a rebellion.

Migratory solidarity 111 In June 2016, a few months after the EU-Turkey deal had taken effect, fewer cases than before reached the Alarm Phone from the Aegean, merely six that month. While between January and March more than 150,000 people had made the crossing, fewer than 7,000 people reached the Greek islands between April and June (UNHCR, 2018). On the 11th of June, a Saturday, the Alarm Phone (2016c) shift team was informed about a small dinghy, carrying fifty-three travellers through the night. Fourteen children were part of this group composed of people from Syria, Iraq, and Eritrea. At 3.59am, one of the passengers reached out to the Alarm Phone, informing our shift team that they were on the move. Some time later, they reported that they had been able to escape from the Turkish coastguards that had chased after them. Having crossed the historically disputed maritime borderline into Greece, they hoped to notify the Greek authorities in order to be rescued ashore of Chios Island. They encountered and then boarded a Greek coastguard vessel. Pictures taken on their smart phones and passed on to the Alarm Phone documented their transfer, as well as the presence of two Frontex vessels nearby. Following their testimonies, they were greeted by five Greek coastguard officers who promised protection: ‘You are safe now. You arrived in Europe’. But instead of moving to the Greek island, the coastguard vessel that was co-financed by Frontex remained on the spot. Anxiously asking for protection and claiming asylum, the travellers were told to remain silent. As one of them recalled afterwards: After 25 minutes a Turkish Coastguard boat came. The Greeks held guns to our heads and threatened to shoot if we don’t move to the Turkish boat. The ‘boss’ of the Greek Coastguards said in English and it should be translated for all people: ‘Tell them I will kill you if you come here again’. The Turkish Coastguards took us and brought us back to Turkey. Through the exchange of GPS coordinates, pictures, and witness accounts, in realtime as well as after their return to Turkey and then following their release from prison, rare insights were gained into an illegal push-back operation at sea. Rare also because of Frontex’s documented presence – the EU agency notoriously adept at distancing itself from implications in human rights violations. Based on the testimonies of the survivors, gathered in an Alarm Phone report, several media outlets reported on the incident (Jakob, 2016b), which in turn set in motion enquiries by activists, NGOs, and a Danish parliamentarian who prompted the Danish immigration minister to ask Frontex questions.6 After several exchanges with the Greek coastguards and scrambling to justify its role in the incident, Frontex released information bit by bit, over the following one and a half years, eventually rejecting all allegations. Following their account, and in contradiction to gathered evidence, the incident had not really taken place in Greece but on the maritime borderline between Turkey and Greece. Moreover, the transfer to

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the Turkish vessel was necessary due to another distress situation nearby, and no violence was recorded, ‘the migrants did not complain or protest’ (Frontex, email communication, 17 January 2017).7 Nevertheless, Frontex’s Fundamental Rights Officer (FRO) later admitted: FRO regrets that during the SAR incident of 11 June 2016 occurred in EPN Poseidon Sea 2016, and as rightfully and specifically mentioned in the Agency’s Annual Report, the requirements as set by Article 4.3 were not met in relation to (i) identification, (ii) assessment of personal circumstances, (iii) information, and (iv) opportunity to oppose disembarkation. FRO wishes to note that even though the general assessment on the situation of Turkey permits the disembarkation in their shores, the assessment of personal circumstances should be conducted in all cases. (Frontex, 2016c: 11–12) The 11 June 2016 case was among the merely nine Serious Incident Reports that were submitted to Frontex during its Aegean mission, the ‘[European Patrols Network] Poseidon 2016 and Poseidon Rapid Intervention 2015–16’ (Frontex, 2016c: 12). It was, however, and contrary to common practice, the only incident for which Frontex’s Fundamental Rights Officer was not appointed as Serious Incident Report coordinator – the reasons for not doing so remain unexplained. The Alarm Phone was unable to prevent the push-back of the precarious travellers in this case, and both Greek authorities and Frontex were able to manoeuvre themselves out of allegations by refusing to respond or by offering cautiously manufactured tales. And yet, the case of June 2016 brought the activist network closer to realise what the Boats4People campaign had already envisioned: an activist collective able to monitor the controllers of migration through networks of solidarity. A new countersurveillance initiative wants to go further. ‘Mare Liberum’, launched in June 2018, and using the Sea-Watch vessel which had previously roamed the waters off Libya, will become, as they state, the ‘NoBorders Navy’ in the Aegean Sea, with the aim to monitor migrants’ sea crossings from Turkey to Greece – and subsequently, the search and rescue operations conducted by the Greek and Turkish Coast Guards; as well as to generally maintain an independent presence during operations performed by other actors involved, i.e. NATO and Frontex. (Mare Liberum, 2018) The Western Mediterranean route, 279 distress cases Travellers who seek to cross into Spain from Morocco, and more rarely from Algeria, commonly carry phones of the older variety, unable to access the internet or to generate GPS positions which makes it harder, at times impossible, to find their

Migratory solidarity 113 precise location. An alternative ‘safety system’ has developed, where those whose time to cross has not yet come, stay behind to follow the journeys of friends or relatives, usually able to pass on information on time and place of departure, the type of vessel used, as well as the number and composition of passengers. Not least due to the Alarm Phone’s presence in Morocco, and allied networks such as NoBorders Morocco and connected (migrant) activists working on the ground there, precarious travellers have made regular use of the activist hotline. Speaking usually in French or English, they reach out either when in urgent distress, when orientation is lost, or when they believe to have entered EUropean waters and want the Spanish search and rescue organisation Salvamento Maritimo alerted to their case. The Western Mediterranean Sea route is predominantly taken by travellers from West Africa, including Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and The Gambia, but also by people from North Africa and even Syria. In overall numbers of sea migration to EUrope, this route has been the least frequented one over the past years, which is one of the reasons why attention has mostly been paid to migration through the Central Mediterranean and the Aegean. Nonetheless, dynamics are currently shifting and unauthorised maritime migration to Spain is dramatically on the rise. In 2016, about 8,000 people arrived in Spain by sea which surpassed arrivals by land and indicated a shift towards greater use of sea routes than in the years before when arrivals by land had always exceeded arrivals by sea. This trend seems to amplify, with 22,103 arrivals via the sea, and 6,246 by land in 2017. Most recently, when Moroccan security forces seemed to have vacated their posts for the end of Ramadan celebrations, more than 1,400 people reached Spain within merely three days in June 2018 (UNHCR, 2018). At the narrowest point less than 8 nautical miles wide, it is in the Strait of Gibraltar where most risk their lives to enter EUrope. The strait where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea meet is known for quickly changing weather conditions, turbulent winds, and currents that catch even experienced sailors by surprise. Commonly organising the journeys independently, small groups embark on flimsy plastic vessels, often in sight of commercial traffic or the many ferries that offer daily transcontinental services – a trip from Tangier/Morocco to Tarifa/Spain takes about one hour. Others cross, at the time of writing less frequently, on larger boats from south-west Morocco through the Atlantic to the Canary Islands, or from north-east Morocco through the Alboran Sea to the southern shores of Spain. Again others take to the sea in order to circumvent Spanish-EUropean border fences and reach the Spanish enclaves of Melilla or Ceuta in Northern Morocco. This was the case on the 6th of February 2014 when, after failing to scale the fence to Ceuta, the attempt of dozens to swim around it was thwarted by the Spanish Guardia Civil which opened fire with rubber bullets and tear gas, leaving at least fifteen people dead (BBC, 2014b). Between October 2014 and May 2018, during which the Alarm Phone engaged in 279 emergency cases, fatalities in the Western Mediterranean Sea have increased every year, rising to more than 750 counted deaths over this period of time. The very first distress case from Morocco, in early December 2014, ended in tragedy

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and was at the same time the deadliest incident in the Western Mediterranean that year (Alarm Phone, 2014b). The Alarm Phone was alerted by friends and relatives of the travellers to an unusually large boat that had gone missing, carrying fiftyseven people. Our shift team was never able to reach them directly and when they were discovered a day later, south of Almeria/Spain, twenty-nine of them had gone overboard and disappeared, including eight children. One member of the Alarm Phone, Miriam Edding (2015, personal communication, 19 January), had to inform friends and relatives of the missing: I had deliberated about how to inform them but I had to tell the bitter truth. They first only said, ‘thank you, thank you’, and asked me to call again later when everybody had been gathered. That was even worse as I realised that a big group was standing around the phone, desperately wanting to know how the people died and what their names were. Later on, it emerged that Alarm Phone members knew a father residing in Morocco whose two little twin sons Assun and Waten had died during the journey (AfriqueEurope-Interact, 2014). After three days, Salvamento Maritimo called off the search for the missing. Besides several cases involving disappearances and fatalities, the Alarm Phone witnessed also the unlikely survival of those whose loss had already been assumed. In July 2015, numerous shift teams worked on a rare distress case close to the Canary Islands (Alarm Phone, 2015d). When we heard of the boat via a contact person in Morocco, it had already sailed for two days, after having left from Boujdour on Morocco’s West Coast. Supposed to have arrived already, the thirty-four people, including four women, had disappeared and despite intensive operations by Spanish and Moroccan forces, they were not found for days. Knowing that Salvamento Maritimo was considering abandoning its search, the Alarm Phone launched a public pressure campaign. The search continued and, after more than five days at sea and hardly any hope left, the boat was localised 17 miles off the coast of Gran Canaria, with all passengers alive. In emergency situations, Salvamento Maritimo has collaborated often reliably with the Alarm Phone network, sending out rescue units, including aerial assets, to find boats in distress. Unlike in other EUropean waters, assaults on migrant boats by EUropean forces or clear instances of maritime abandonment are, for the time being, rather rare in the Western Mediterranean. Nonetheless, in light of increased sea migration, collaborations between the Moroccan Navy and Spanish authorities have intensified, so that interceptions of migrant boats and their return to Morocco have become frequent, documented in dozens of Alarm Phone cases. What constitutes a forced interception, or pull-back, in contrast to a rescue operation is often difficult to say, not least since every overcrowded plastic boat seems by default in

Migratory solidarity 115 distress. It is often only through the testimonies of survivors that a clearer picture emerges. As Fadel Fadiga recounts: The worst thing is when you have the Moroccan Navy in front of you [. . .]. And when they come in order to take us, the water causes waves in front of their big boat. It can happen that we capsize with the rubber dingy. That is dangerous, [. . .] if you don’t have a life vest [. . .], you will die. Because they won’t protect you, they won’t intervene. [. . .] We had such cases: people who fell into the water in plain view of the Moroccan Navy. So often people come back from the water and say that one person is missing, that this person fell into the water when the navy came to intercept them. (Alarm Phone, 2017a: 52) This was the case in June 2016, when the Alarm Phone shift team was informed about a lethal interception by the Moroccan Navy. Alerted by Salvamento Maritimo to the location of the migrant boat, the Moroccan forces intervened, trying to prevent the boat from escaping north. Causing the boat to turn over in the process, all eight passengers fell into the sea. Three of them – Saliou Fall, Pape Ndiaye, and Cheik Ndiaye – disappeared and their bodies were never found, among them the brother of our informant (Alarm Phone, 2016d). The survivors wrote a statement, published by the Alarm Phone (2016e): We demand to clarify the situation as the human rights have been violated again in Morocco. A country where black persons are not being heard. We are asking to recover the dead bodies and we demand justice. Solidarity in unembodied encounters Migrant vessels are places of political contestation that carry subjects who enact their right to leave, move, survive, and arrive. In order to understand the vehicle as ‘a site of political action’, Walters (2015b: 481, 472) has called for ‘an account of migration that is much thicker with things and their entanglements with humans’. One of those ‘things’ through which migrant struggles at sea become politicised, is the phone. Alarm Phone solidarity has adapted, and continues to adapt, to the realities of unauthorised migration, and the immediate needs of precarious travellers during one of the most dangerous sequences of their journeys, when encounters between activists and travellers materialise in the very moment of the latter facing EUrope’s necropolitical violence in a space that often constitutes a de facto legal black hole (Mann, 2016 and 2017). To suggest that such solidarity is ‘unembodied’ may be somewhat misleading, not least due to the very physical and material engagement and presence of Alarm Phone members in local and transborder struggles throughout EUrope, Northern Africa, and

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Turkey. Nonetheless, the countless encounters between activists and travellers merely through the phone are very different to those between the families of the disappeared and Boats4People campaigners. In emergency situations at sea, solidarity is not enacted in face-to-face encounters but fleetingly, between subjects remaining mostly anonymous to one another. That contact persists as it did with Safinaz from Syria or some of those who crossed the Western Mediterranean is rare, and next to impossible in the Central Mediterranean, after the satellite phone gets thrown overboard. Distributed by activist and migrant networks in places of departure, transit, and arrival through word-of-mouth campaigns, workshops, or social media, and further circulated through allies and informants in migrant communities and diasporas, the emergency number has become part of a largely invisible web of ‘migrant digitalities’ (Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou and Tsianos, 2014), sustained by instant messaging services and online platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook. At times, coordinates, pictures, videos, or (recorded voice) messages can be passed on directly from precarious vessels or through uncountable contact persons and activist allies, allowing shift teams, themselves often connected digitally, to respond to distress situations. Support can be given even when no word is exchanged between activists and those on the move. In dozens of distress cases off the Libyan coast, the Alarm Phone was able to charge the travellers’ satellite phones digitally, thus guaranteeing their ability to make distress calls. In these situations, with no direct contact between them and us, we could observe their decreasing credit online, every drop a sign of life, showing that they were still able to reach out, maybe to relatives, friends, or coastguards. What precedes and enables these mostly anonymous encounters, however, is a network of trust, built over years of local grassroot engagement within and beyond EUrope. When moving precariously and knowing well the border regime’s desire for identification, trust is not given to anyone and not everyone is called. Many know well the danger of confiding in unknown others and often display a healthy scepticism towards authorities and even to those seemingly there in solidarity. What some of the activist or humanitarian initiatives, often rapidly set-up during 2015’s ‘long summer’ all over EUrope, fail to understand is that trust needs to be earned through long-term engagement and presence in migrant networks, and even then, scepticism may disperse only slowly. As one Alarm Phone (migrant) contact person who lives in Tangier/Morocco recounts: I met somebody who didn’t believe in the Alarm Phone. I explained to him several times how it works, but we always had discussions on that topic. [. . .] Although he knew a lot of people who took the boat, he did not want to call the Alarm Phone because he had his doubts. For example, he said that the Alarm Phone would call the Moroccan [Navy]. [. . .] One day there was a big boat that left by sea. It was a boat with 46 people. The guy in question was

Migratory solidarity 117 in touch with that boat. I got in touch with him in order to convince him to call the Alarm Phone. Finally, it was me who put the boat in touch with the Alarm Phone. We followed up on the case until 3am. In the end, Salvamento Maritimo saved them. In this moment, the guy was really grateful and he understood the importance of the project. (Alarm Phone, 2017a: 85) In order to make a project such as the Alarm Phone possible, its members had to be/come immersed in existing webs of interpersonal contacts, often composed only of close relatives, friends, and communities of travellers, forming safety nets as well as nodal points for information and advice. In the Aegean Sea, the Alarm Phone cooperates closely with Syrian and Iraqi networks, in the Central Mediterranean mainly with the priest Father Zerai, and in the Western Mediterranean with (Sub-Saharan) African contact persons residing in Morocco. Only through these solidarities is the Alarm Phone able to support the ways in which ‘mobile subjects perform or act “rights of way” or “rights of passage” [. . .] which can be clandestine, informal and not recognized by law [but are] de facto present and operational’ (Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou and Tsianos, 2014: 35). These webs of solidarity are part of what Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013: 190) have referred to as mobile commons, created by those on the move: a world of knowledge, of information, of tricks for survival, of mutual care, of social relations, of services exchange, of solidarity and sociability that can be shared, used and where people contribute to sustain and expand it. For them (2013: 190–191, emphases in original), mobile commons are underwritten by a ‘politics of care’, comprised of an ‘invisible knowledge of mobility that circulates between people on the move’, as well as ‘diverse forms of transnational communities of justice’. As a (constitutive) part of these worlds of mobile connections and knowledges that often emerge through and are maintained by novel technologies, the Alarm Phone network seeks to transcend activist and migrant signifiers, intervening right at the ‘nexus of “movement as politics” and “movement as motion”’ (Mitropoulos and Neilson, 2006). Several members have survived sea journeys themselves and are able to provide, besides their linguistic and other expertise, crucial insights into how sea-crossings are organised and experienced. One person engaged in Alarm Phone activities prior to his escape, then moved precariously himself and called the hotline while in distress at sea. After survival and arrival in EUrope, he continued to engage in the activist phone project. At times, shift teams were connected to, or even composed of several different ‘generations’ of successful sea-crossers from different Mediterranean regions: Newroz crossed the Aegean from Turkey in 2001 and landed in Italy, Eltaf from Afghanistan reached Greece

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Image 4.4 Alarm Phone protest action in Zarzis/Tunisia, April 2018 Source: Alarm Phone Tunis

in 2009, and A. Abreham from Eritrea arrived in Lampedusa in 2013. The three now come together in Germany to offer solidarity to those who follow in their footsteps and who enact their right to move and to survive. Composed of various trans-border and trans-categorical alliances and conceived as a pillar of an existing underground railroad supportive of contemporary enactments of escape, the Alarm Phone is among those political struggles that bridge, or rather collapse, the often maintained but erroneous dualism between movements considered ‘social/activist’ and those considered ‘migratory’, where the former’s politicality is routinely presumed while the latter’s is doubted or ignored.

Solidarity as resistance Between 2011, when the Boats4People campaign was first envisioned, and June 2018, about 19,000 people are known to have lost their lives in the Mediterranean – a maritime massacre but also an increasingly normalised spectacle played out year after year in front of a global audience (UNHCR, 2018). Migrant death at sea constitutes ‘every form of indirect murder’, following Foucault’s (2004: 256) conception: ‘the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’. It is, nonetheless, routinely constructed as a sort of ‘natural death’, allowing for a moral alibi (Doty,

Migratory solidarity 119 2011; Squire, 2014). Precarious sea migration seems to return us to the ‘natural state’ of the sea, imagined as a quasi-lawless and unregulated realm separating lands and peoples, governed not by humans but biophysical forces: the current, the cold, the winds, and the waves (Steinberg, 2015). In the dominant imagination, the sea becomes emptied out, it seems devoid of politics, as if, indeed, ‘[o]n the waves, there is nothing but waves’ (Schmitt, 2006: 42–43). This is not all too surprising when we pay attention to the ways in which travellers, reduced to a seemingly indistinguishable mass of mobile non-white bodies, are often constituted as an invading natural force. In the Mediterranean, provocatively asked, where else than in the water would a migrant stream, a migrant wave, a migrant swarm, or a migrant flood belong? In 1981 at a press conference in Geneva, Foucault read out a statement voicing solidarity with the ‘boat-people’ fleeing Vietnam. Therein, Foucault (1994d: 707–708) spoke with ‘no other reason for speaking, and for speaking together, than a certain shared difficulty in enduring what is taking place’. He rhetorically asked: ‘Who has commissioned us, then?’, to state: ‘No one. And that is precisely what constitutes our right’ (my translation). There exists an international citizenry, which has its rights, which has its duties, and which promises to raise itself up against every abuse of power, no matter who the author or the victims. After all we are all governed and, to that extent, in solidarity. (Foucault, translated in Campbell, 2008: 300) Foucault continued by declaring that the duty of the ‘international citizenry’ would be to protest people’s misfortunes and assign responsibility to governments. These misfortunes, he held, should never constitute ‘a silent remainder of politics’ but, to the contrary, form the reason for ‘an absolute right to rise up and address those holding power’ (Foucault, 1994d: 708, my translation). Foucault’s words speak to the activism of Boats4People and the Alarm Phone in several ways. Not commissioned by anyone, they responded to suffering at sea by taking the right to intervene in a space seemingly reserved for EUropean authorities into their own hands. And yet, believing solidarity to rest simply on the fact of being governed, Foucault’s declaration flattens out solidarity – too different and unequal are the experiences of those exposed to ‘government’. Marked by different experiences of racialised border violence and hierarchical power relations, an easy comingtogether of different subjectivities in solidarity cannot be assumed. The encounters between Boats4People activists and the parents of the disappeared prove that enactments of solidarity at the border are difficult and entail a horizon of failure, exposing everyone involved to the possibility of becoming unsettled. Misunderstandings and disappointment could not be avoided, not least as, ultimately, the parents’ quest to find out about the whereabout and well-being of their children remained without answers.

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Solidarity cannot be thought to simply exist, David Featherstone (2012: 246, 245) writes, and believed to be ‘something which just binds already formed communities together’, but, instead, constitutes a political relation ‘that can be articulated and configured in different, potentially conflictual ways’. That solidarity attempts at the border are saturated by asymmetrical power relations, meaning that those encountering one another inhabit vastly different positionalities, can neither be denied nor avoided – it is the reason for their desperately needed formation. Especially in struggles over migration, such solidarity without guarantees forms between subjects of border crossing, their relatives, and those of flighthelp, always-already unstable signifiers, fostering relations that may last only brief periods of time, often in the very moment of traversing borders. Unlike in many humanitarian and some activist interventions, always at risk of slipping into seemingly firm roles of ‘humanitarian saviours’ vis-à-vis ‘migrant victims’, collective solidarity that becomes migratory works towards progressively dissolving unequal and hierarchical power relations, despite the fact that in the process of identification with one another an impasse may remain, at the site where we ask ourselves what it might mean to continue in a dialogue where no common ground can be assumed, where one is, [as] it were, at the limits of what one knows yet still under the demand to offer and receive acknowledgement: to someone else who is there to be addressed and whose address is there to be received. (Butler, 2005: 21–22) In order to have such an encounter and dialogue at the border, translations are needed. Since border struggles, as Mezzadra and Neilson (2013: 308) note, ‘are almost always confronted with the material need to translate [. . .], they have become crucial for the political project of the common’. A project of the common does not assume commonness and unity but responds to the imperative to be-with one another precisely because of all the borders that work to separate. Migratory solidarity, then, seems to be the process of collectivising struggle at the border and of identifying despite difference, with the possibility of failure always lurking. In the encounters between the families of the disappeared and Boats4People campaigners or between those in distress at sea and Alarm Phone activists, nothing could be guaranteed, not even survival. By creating connections precisely in spaces where EUropean borders implement deadly divisions, such solidarity constitutes a form of resistance that counter-performs and prefigures the Mediterranean space as one not of abjection but of encounter and exchange. These solidarities are reminders that the now seemingly natural maritime barrier of the Mediterranean – a space that once looked quite different, forming ‘a natural unity’ and a ‘meeting place of cultures’ (Delanty and Rumford, 2005: 31) – can look different again in times to come. Collective struggles that emerge from experiences

Migratory solidarity 121 of disappearance and loss, or that materialise in the very moment of someone’s exposure to forces that make disappear, cannot but be based upon a form of solidarity that is migratory, moving in embodied or unembodied ways, as ‘potential coalitions waiting to be formed’ (Crenshaw, 1991: 1299). As borders shift, proliferate, and become increasingly diffused but no less violent, solidarity, too, has entered spaces of abjection in order to establish a contentious presence that exceeds and unmakes sedentary and identitarian frames, quite literally, in motion.

Notes 1 Tunisian woman and Farouk Ben Lhiba during a Boats4People meeting in Monastir, quoted in the documentary ‘Against the Tide’ by Nathalie Loubeyre (2016). 2 Groups and organisations participating in the Boats4People campaign: Afrique-EuropeInteract, Euro-African network, Migreurop, FIDH (International Federation For Human Rights), Flüchtlingsrat Hamburg, Welcome to Europe, Terre solidaire (Comité Catholique contre la Faim et pour le Développement), FASTI (Fédération des Associations de Travailleurs Immigrés), Cimade, GISTI (Groupe d’Information et de Soutien des Immigrés), RESF 13 (Réseau Éducation Sans Frontières Bouches du Rhône), ARCI (Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana), AME (Association Malienne des Expulsés), ARACEM (Association des Refoulés d’Afrique Centrale au Mali), ABCDS (Association Beni Znassen pour la Culture, le Développement et la Solidarité), GADEM (Groupe Antiraciste de Défense et d’accompagnement des Étrangers et Migrants), All Included, CETUMA (Centre de Tunis pour la Migration et l’Asile), FTDES (Forum Tunisien pour les Droits Économiques et Sociaux), as well as various (other) activist groups and individuals. 3 The sentiments gathered at Boats4People events and replicated in this chapter will be referred to as ‘Research Notes’. 4 The vast majority of Tunisians taking to the boats in 2011 were (young) men and in our encounters, all the missing people were exclusively men. This is of course not to say that women were not crossing the sea at the time. Moreover, as mentioned before, it is very important to note that not all the Boats4People activists were (white) ‘EUropeans’. Some participants had survived their migration journeys years earlier and created activist groups/campaigns/NGOs in EUrope, others were active in African contexts. However, in these encounters that I experienced, the majority of activists were (white) EUropeans encountering Tunisian families. 5 Activist groups and networks part of the Alarm Phone: WatchTheMed, Boats4People, Welcome2Europe, Afrique-Europe-Interact, Borderline-Europe, NoBorders Morocco, Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration, and Voix des Migrants. 6 I want to thank the Danish MP Søren Søndergaard as well as Chris Jones from Statewatch for their support in following up on this push-back case in the Aegean Sea. 7 Frontex cited in response to Danish Immigration Minister Inger Støjberg, following questions posed by the MP Søren Søndergaard [Email Communication, 17 January 2017].

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Diagnostics of EUrope

Before there can be any serious analysis of racism and its relationship to migrations, we have to ask ourselves what this word ‘Europe’ means and what it will signify tomorrow. (Balibar, 1991: 7) ‘European culture’, the ‘European spirit’, the ‘ethos of Europe’, ‘Europe’s unique creativity’ – these are some ways of identifying the deep rooted unity of Europe and pointing to a common destiny that emerges from the actions of Europe constructed as a singular subject. (Bhambra, 2009: 75) [A]s myriad migrations come sweeping through this European space, what do we encounter but the returns of Europe’s global (colonial) history? (De Genova, 2013b: 177)

To an extent unfathomable only a few years ago, recent struggles over migration have transformed EUrope, and not simply in terms of demographic composition. The EUropean ‘project’ seems to find itself in a prolonged crisis, especially after the unauthorised arrival of hundreds of thousands in 2015, sparking conflicts and antagonisms among and between (entire blocs of) EU member states and institutions over divergent agendas and strategies in governing migratory movements and over questions of reception and the ‘fair’ relocation of newcomers. As evidenced by recent national elections in several member states that saw market shifts to the political right, EUro-scepticism has amplified in times of rampant ethnonationalism (Lewis and Amin, 2017). The planned withdrawal of the UK from the EU, predominantly the result of populist fear campaigns carried by anti-migrant sentiments, will lead to a shrinking of the EUropean community, in terms of territory, global significance, and population size, dropping below the half a billion mark after the Brexit (McConnell, Kuus, Jeffrey, Crawley, Vaughan-Williams and Smith, 2017). In light of severe challenges to the vision of a EUrope steadily growing closer together, the

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And yet, somewhat paradoxically, the migrant arrivals portrayed and treated as crisis have also reinforced certain processes of EUropeanisation, brought about foremost by the apparent consensus that 2015’s mass intrusions into EUropean space would need to remain a singular and exceptional historic episode, an anomaly never to occur again. The perceived urgent need to discipline unauthorised migrations by further securitising and EUropeanising the border has deepened and consolidated existing and fostered novel EUropean collaborations, alliances, and spaces. Since 2015, in rapid succession, a range of measures were adopted. Still in 2015, the Commission presented a legislative proposal for the creation of a European Border and Coast Guard, building on existing structures of Frontex but with greatly expanded mandate, personnel, and budget (Frontex, 2016a). It was approved in record time by Council and European Parliament, and became legally operational in October 2016. The creation of the EU Agency for Asylum is currently underway, intended to strengthen the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), which seeks to bolster cooperation among EU member states, ‘[provide] overburdened countries with technical assistance and manpower, and [monitor] the fair distribution of refugees’ (European Parliament, 2017a). The Dublin Regulation was not discarded as some had speculated in 2015, after even Germany, long one of its main profiteers, had voiced doubts, but was instead stabilised through the installation of several hotspots (European Council, 2018). Through the ‘hotspot approach’, Italy and Greece, known to have been intentionally careless when it came to the registration and fingerprinting of the newly arrived, are now watched over by several EU agencies involved in the registration process – Frontex, Europol, Eurojust, and EASO. In late 2017, the European Parliament (2017b) approved the novel ‘Entry/ Exit System’ in order to ‘register information on non-EU nationals, such as name, travel document, fingerprints, facial image, date and place when they enter, exit or are refused entry into the Schengen area’. Besides these intensified processes of collective border control inside the union, only some of which were alluded to, we see a rapid growth in deterrence measures in EUrope’s external dimension. Of note and far-reaching consequence were not merely the EU-Turkey deal of March 2016 and several agreements with Libyan authorities, including the training of Libyan coastguards by Frontex (2016b) as part of the military operation Eunavfor Med, but also the various other deals reinforcing cooperation with African countries. (Re-)Discovering Africa in its desire to address the ‘root causes’ of migration, the action plan adopted at the Valletta Summit on migration in November 2015 strengthened collaborations between EUrope and African countries of ‘origin’ and ‘transit’ in terms of fighting irregular migration, which

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were again deepened in June 2016 when a new partnership framework was adopted, focusing on five ‘priority countries: Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal’ (European Council, 2017). As the places of ‘departure’, North African countries besides Libya have also concluded a range of agreements with EUrope to bolster their border ‘protection’ capacities, aiming to drastically decrease migratory movements to EUrope via the Mediterranean Sea (Jakob and Schlindwein, 2018). Certainly, much of this wealth of new measures both in what is considered EUrope’s nominal space and its external dimension is the result of security rationales that have existed long before 2015. However, the pace of implementation, the disregard of long-standing principles (including the principle of non-refoulement), and the seemingly unproblematic collaboration with authoritarian and dictatorial regimes signal a novel chapter in EUrope’s history of border enforcement. This chapter explores how migrant resistances give contour to EUrope’s present condition. Although the multi-sited ethnography in this book has portrayed particular struggles that animated particular reasons for hardship in Germany, Greece, Italy, and ‘the Mediterranean’, they allow us also to trace and analyse EUrope as such. When Foucault spoke of counter-conduct, a conceptualisation of resistance that informs this book, he understood even micro-practices as inhabiting, besides their transformative capacity, the potential to provide a grid of analysis through which one could study and measure dominant relations of power. The subjects of these counter-conducts are not ‘marginal subjects that subsist on the edges of society’, but rather, as Mezzadra and Neilson (2013: 159) put it, ‘central protagonists in the drama of composing the space, time, and materiality of the social itself’. As the preceding chapters have shown, migrant resistances animate EUrope’s border regime by contesting technologies and mechanisms of governance, exposing the many moments and diverse sites when, where, and for whom borders materialise. Continuing with this line of investigation, the following explores what these resistances reveal about EUrope’s condition, not least as it has become starkly obvious, and not only since the recent mass arrivals that ‘[t]he question of Europe itself has become inextricable from the question of migration’ (De Genova, 2017a: 22). This chapter is organised into four parts. It first makes the case for conceiving migrant resistances as significant analytics through which EUrope can be traced, in particular those aspects that are often rendered not EUropean or not (of) EUrope in its own narrative and perception. Butler’s (2009) elaboration on ‘frames’ helps us explore what I refer to as the dominant frames of EUrope, thus those imaginaries and narratives that continuously reproduce a particular idea of what EUrope is. In the subsequent three parts, three of these dominant frames are highlighted – EUrope conceived as a transborder, humanitarian, as well as a post-racial and postcolonial polity. In sub-sections within these parts, I show how the subjects of migrant resistance disrupt these frames, by visibilising EUrope in border violence, by becoming a humanitarian problem, and by provincialising EUrope in racialised encounters.

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Tracing EUrope through resistance The task of tracing EUrope is crucial, despite, or rather because of the fact that EUrope (or Europe, even) is regularly treated as a given entity, based on the unfounded premise, according to Walters and Haahr (2005: 2), that ‘we know where and what Europe is’. For Walker (cited in Walters and Haahr, 2005: 2), EUrope often comes to be imagined as ‘a geographical place [. . .], a cultural, political, economic or military presence, or achievement, or possibility – that is bold and dynamic’. Notwithstanding its supposed givenness, scholars who seek to render contemporary EUrope decipherable have created a range of concepts that characterise it in a plethora of ways: polycentricity (multiple centres encouraging diffused growth rather than coreperiphery distinctions); ‘network Europe’ (an EU characterised by connectivity and mobility); territorial cohesion (the balanced distribution of economic activities across the Union); multi-level governance (partnerships between EU institutions, national governments, and regional and local authorities); borderlands (zones of interaction between countries rather than ‘hard’ frontiers); Europe-as-empire (the non-state-like organization of the EU comprising an internal ‘variable geometry’ and flexible, expanding frontiers). (Rumford, 2008a: 30–31) EUrope, while often treated as a known entity, seems to slip out of one’s grasp every time one seeks to settle on a definitive form. For Rumford (2008a: 18), then: According to taste, the EU is either a supranational state or post-national polity, or, at the other end of the spectrum, an entity which cannot begin to be captured by this terminology, and for which a new conceptual vocabulary is needed. As briefly explained before, the neologism ‘EUrope’ has been employed throughout this book to problematise the routine equation between the political space, polity, and community defined as EU and Europe, an equation that many voices also in this chapter make seemingly without hesitation. For one, and obviously, EUrope is less than Europe, geographically and politically – the reduction of Europe to the space and polity of the EU seems often born out of habit or negligence. At the same time, EUrope is also more than Europe, certainly politically but also geographically, giving that the territorial holdings of EU member states do not coincide with the typical representation of the European continent (Hansen, 2004). As noted throughout the book, especially scholars associated with Critical Border Studies, Critical Citizenship Studies, and the Autonomy of Migration, rather than with European Studies, have significantly advanced a novel conceptual vocabulary by paying close attention to what emerges as EUrope through the ways human multiplicities are governed. EUrope conceptualised as

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‘borderzone’ (Squire, 2011), ‘borderland’ (Balibar, 2009), ‘borderscape’ (Perera, 2007), or ‘Schengenland’ (Walters, 2002) highlights not only the changing patterns, dynamics, and technologies of contemporary borderwork but inasmuch the ways in which EUropean identity and space is (thereby) constituted. When, more than two decades ago, Derrida (1992: 5) queried to what ‘singular entity’ the name of ‘Europe’ should be assigned and wondered who would ‘draw up its borders?’, it seems clear today that heterogeneous actors implicated in the border regime force something into being that can be imagined as (of) EUrope. As shown in greater detail later on, more is of EUrope, and done by EUrope, than what is expressed by those who seem to speak in its name. In light of the increasingly EUropeanised border, it may thus be favourable to think of German-EUropean, Hungarian-EUropean, and Greek-EUropean pursuits in borderwork. Imagining and framing something as (of) EUrope does not mean concocting a narrow definition, reproducing a ‘narrative of cohesion’ (Rumford, 2008a: 23), ignoring the many tensions and contradictions within such formation, or engaging in ‘methodological Europeanism’ (Garelli and Tazzioli, 2013a: 300). Speaking of EUrope – maybe necessarily an impossibility – does not construct it as a homogeneous actor or singular unit of analysis that simply exists out there in the world, where its many parts come neatly together to form a uniform whole. After all, as is every political formation, EUrope is constantly emergent, constructed, and re-constructed, so that, consequently, any conceptualisation or definition of EUrope, as Bhambra (2009: 69) notes, ‘is necessarily a political and contested exercise’. Contentions over migrant movement and presence constitute at one and the same time contentions over EUrope’s identity. Articulating EUrope through migrant struggles allows to problematise that which is often conveniently rendered not EUropean or not (of) EUrope, and to juxtapose it with EUrope’s dominant presentation to the world. Through identity-forming narratives, told and retold, emanating inter alia from EU policy elites, institutions, and member state governments, as well as (European Studies) scholarship, we have become used to linear and often romantic stories of the EUropean project as a quest towards a post-national community, having overcome the pettiness and dangers of nationalism that had ravaged the continent in two world wars (Stråth, 2002). While some processes of EUropeanisation are at the forefront of EUrope’s narratives of itself, including the supposed erasure of borders within the union conceived as one of its main achievements and corner stones, other deeply interwoven aspects are made to disappear from sight. Particularly and peculiarly absent from these tales of EUrope are the atrocities that go hand in hand with the EUropeanisation of the border. In the following three parts, three dominant frames of EUrope are highlighted. Drawing from Butler’s work, frames can be thought of as mediating devises that engender collective interpretations and apprehensions. Frames suggest a certain order and stability of that which is framed. They attempt ‘to contain, convey, and determine what is seen’, which, for Butler (2009: 10, 1) means that, as ‘operations

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of power’, and even if they cannot ‘unilaterally decide the conditions of appearance’, frames seek ‘to delimit the sphere of appearance itself’. Their aim is to allow certain ideas, norms, or truths to become recognised and recognisable – ‘recognizability describes those general conditions on the basis of which recognition can and does take place’ (2009: 6). Some frames are more recognisable than others as they succeed in establishing the conditions that allow for their continuous reproduction. EUropean frames that are constantly reproduced, often by those who seem to speak ‘in the name of Europe’ (Walters and Haahr, 2005: 4, emphasis in original), are referred to as dominant frames, able to invent and reproduce a truth about themselves that do not simply reside in the imaginary but actualise in, and guide, material practice. After all, in the words of Foucault (1986b: 70), ‘[t]he imaginary is not a mode of unreality, but indeed a mode of actuality’. EUrope is neither ‘a natural fact of geography’, nor does it ‘possess essential and unchanging characteristics’, but, rather, is ‘a concept fashioned by humans, established and reinvented according to historically-specific belief systems and ideological principles’ (Stock, 2017: 27). For Paul Stock (emphases in original), ‘ideas about Europe are also real, precisely because people believe that they are and because they act on those beliefs’. The frame, even if dominant, never is static and exhaustive but unstable. According to Butler (2009: 10), it ‘does not quite contain what it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give definitive organization to its content’. The frame’s attempt to reproduce by re-narrating a truth about itself in alternating contexts, exposes ‘its vulnerability to reversal, to subversion, even to critical instrumentalization’ (2009: 10). Even dominant frames are unable to reproduce themselves without disruption, where a taken-for-granted idea or truth becomes challenged. Conceiving of EUrope through several constructed frames that retain vulnerability in efforts of reproduction means departing from a conception of EUrope as a given, static, and singular formation while nonetheless allowing it to be deciphered and articulated. Migrant resistances, then, can be seen as prime moments to dynamically explore the dominant framing of EUrope which emerge in processes of truthmaking and truth-reproduction. They can be viewed as raising, or maybe already responding to two questions posed by Butler (2009: 6): What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability? What might be done, in other words, to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to produce more radically democratic results? By contesting ‘the exclusion of others from the narratives of Europe, European modernity, and European integration’ (Bhambra, 2009: 81), migrant resistances challenge, disrupt, and de-centre dominant frames by bringing to the fore what is routinely silenced and made disappear from sight when EUrope gives an account of itself. As catalysts, they help rupture the frame so that ‘a taken-for-granted

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reality is called into question, exposing the orchestrating designs of the authority who sought to control the frame’ (Butler, 2009: 12). Expressed dissensually, excessively, and through solidarity practices, migration struggles provoke with great urgency a debate on what that is that ‘we’ call EUrope and raise the question of EUrope anew: When seen through forms of struggle that resist the ways in which human multiplicities are governed and regulated, where does EUrope begin and end, what does it stand for, and who is and who is not thought to belong to it?

Transborder EUrope (or, EUrope as migrant) In September 2017, the European Commission rejected Hungary’s request to have the EU contribute to its expenditures for the building of its border fences to Serbia and Croatia. The Hungarian government had sought 400 million Euros as financial compensation, arguing that Hungary was ‘protecting all the citizens of Europe from the flood of illegal migrants’ (Deutsche Welle, 2017). A Commission spokesperson explained that while the EU supported member states’ border management, including through surveillance measures and equipment, ‘[w]e are not financing the construction of fences or barriers at the external borders’ (Euobserver, 2017). What appears in light of the rampant securitisation of several EUropean land and sea borders a surprising statement, is more than an off-the-cuff remark. Eager to avoid depictions à la ‘Fortress EUrope’, those who speak in the name of EUrope, and especially for its institutions, have criticised, besides Hungary, also Greece and Austria for erecting border fences, though being lenient when, ‘linked to the exceptional circumstances resulting from the context of the unprecedented migratory and refugee crisis which started in 2015’, a range of member states followed Germany’s and Austria’s lead in mid-September 2015 in ‘temporarily reintroducing border control at the internal borders’ (European Commission, 2016b). Even if, at the time of writing, these ‘temporary’ measures persist, they will not permanently alter the appearance of EUrope, or at least not to the extent that static physical barriers would, and that is significant. The Commission’s opposition to novel ‘hard’ barriers in EUrope but also around the world, of which Jones (2016: 88) has counted an increase from fifteen in 1990 to almost seventy in 2016, stems from more than the strategic calculous that walls or fences, according to Frontex head Leggeri, ‘cannot stop people in the long term’ (Zeit Online, 2016). EUrope’s embrace of ‘smart’ borders and migration ‘management’ policies and technologies has been critically observed and discussed (Geiger and Pécoud, 2012), less so what appears an undergirding sentiment for eschewing, at least publicly, ‘old-school physical barriers’: the belief that it is not only strategically advantageous but also the EUropean and (thus) ethically right thing to do. After all, as the European Commission (2011: 6) notes, ‘migration governance is not about “flows”, “stocks” and “routes”, it is about people’. While it is true that EUropean borders are like all borders, as De Genova (2017a: 21) notes, in that they constitute ‘materializations of sociopolitical relations that

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mediate the continuous production of the distinction between the putative inside and outside’, EUrope’s spatial divides are not supposed to appear quite like all others. Whereas governments in the US, Australia, and elsewhere aggressively foster the imaginary of the insurmountable border at territorial edges, ostensibly protecting that which lies inside from the threat that looms beyond, EUrope’s borders are often enveloped in a different narrative in which notions of division, separation, and exclusion rarely feature. Although it is undeniable that security discourses are not at all absent in the EUropean context, inasmuch as humanitarian sentiments are certainly also found in the US and Australia, as further explored in the following part, in one of its dominant frames, EUrope displays a particular aversion to hard borders. There appears to be a fuzziness, softness, and humaneness to EUrope’s borders that, I argue, stem from EUrope framed as a community characterised not by clearly demarcatable limits but, to the contrary, by a transborder idea. The exchange between EU representatives and the Hungarian government on the issue of compensation for the border fence is illustrative for it reveals the mechanism that calls something into being that is (of) EUrope in the very moment of rejecting that what is rendered un-EUropean. While undoubtedly voiced with a degree of cynicism and presumably little expectation of actual concession from the Commission, the sincerity of Hungary’s claim that it had ‘guarded’ and ‘protected’ EUrope as a whole, rather than merely its own nationstate territory, cannot be easily dismissed. It is a largely undisputed fact that only the fenced-off Balkan route in combination with the EU-Turkey deal were able to bring the mass migrations to northern EUrope to a (near) halt in Spring 2016 – something that EU member states and institutions had so desperately desired at a time when all ‘smart’ borders and instruments of migration ‘management’ had dramatically failed. For those on the move, Hungary was never their desired place of settlement but merely a transitory space on their journeys further north and west. The Hungarian border enforcers were thus also EUropean border enforcers – precisely what the Commission (2002: 9) seemed to have had in mind when instructing national authorities in 2002 that in the quest ‘towards integrated management of the external border’, they would be ‘now guarding the borders of the Member States of the European Union, [and] should therefore, see their activity as a contribution to a European check and surveillance network’. That Hungary received little recognition or praise for the radical ‘defence’ of its thoroughly EUropean border, is largely due to scenes of Hungarian police brutality against vulnerable people on the move – entire families, children, the sick, and elderly beaten and pepper-sprayed – that, together with prime minister Orban’s overtly racist anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, travelled the world (Al Jazeera, 2015). They were simply too crude to be of EUrope, rejected as the actions and words of a rogue member state that needed scolding and reminding of EUropean values and humane ways to govern borders. That Hungary’s request

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for financial support was unequivocally rejected is then as unsurprising as the fact that, following Kasparek and Speer (2015): Hungary is now being pilloried for its callous attempts at maintaining the rules of the European border and migration regime, while Germany, regardless of its role as architect and driving force of that very regime, wins worldwide acclaim for its humanitarian stance. Architect Germany has ascribed to the ‘post-national’ way of governing borders, preferred also by EUropean institutions: externalising and outsourcing them to non-EUropean authorities, reinforcing EUrope’s ‘frontline archipelago’ through the hotspot approach (Garelli and Tazzioli, 2016), rejuvenating the (Dublin) deportation regime and pressurising geographically peripheral member states to fulfil their ‘obligation’ in preventing the newly arrived from moving on, declaring more and more third country conflict zones ‘safe’ enough for the displaced to be contained or returned to, restricting the freedoms and rights of those already present in EUrope while using the phase of unwanted but unavoidable movements into its territories as evidence of its humane intentions. On a deeper ideational level, EUrope’s declared aversion to hard borders is consistent with one of its dominant frames, firmly rooted in its self-conception as a transborder project. In this frame, EUrope’s very existence is based upon the continuous transgression of divisions that once separated enemies. Beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War and gathering force after the fall of the Iron Curtain, successive rounds of enlarging, widening, and deepening progressively erased spatial divides and created an ever-more integrated community (Outhwaite, 2017). For former Commission President Barroso and Council President Van Rompuy, as they stated in their 2012 Nobel Prize acceptance speech ‘From war to peace: a European tale’, it was a bold bet [. . .] for Europe’s Founders, to say, yes, we can break this endless cycle of violence, we can stop the logic of vengeance, we can build a brighter future, together. What power of the imagination. [. . .] It worked. Peace is now self-evident. War has become inconceivable. (European Commission, 2012b) According to them, EUrope’s genesis and being seem premised on a desire to transgress borders: Over the past sixty years, the European project has shown that it is possible for peoples and nations to come together across borders. That it is possible to overcome the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’. More trajectory than state, more nomad than settler, EUrope itself seems to be ceaselessly moving – a migrant in its own image. The erection of novel (static) borders, even those at its presumptively external frontiers, then seems antithetical to

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EUrope’s very being, and at risk to belie the painfully learned lessons of a divided past. According to Barroso and Van Rompuy, what holds EUrope together are not definitive demarcations, but, rather, ‘the will to remain masters of our own destiny, a sense of togetherness, and in a way [. . .] speaking to us from the centuries [. . .] the idea of Europa itself’. At the same time, and importantly, in this transborder frame, the transgression of national borders does not manifest the erasure of distinct ‘national’ characteristics but, instead, the peaceful creation of a community united in diversity, as the EU motto holds. Adopted in 2000, it ‘signifies how Europeans have come together, in the form of the EU, to work for peace and prosperity, while at the same time being enriched by the continent’s many different cultures, traditions and languages’ (European Union, 2000). Interestingly, retaining differences is not viewed as hindering but, to the contrary, as generative of a collective EUropean identity and an ‘ever closer union’. In EUrope, unlike elsewhere it often appears to be presumed, it is possible to forge an identity through both the transgression of boundaries and the celebration of remaining differences. The capacity to live together among others, the different, not the same, seems a shared EUropean trait, maybe its main characteristic. Proposing acceptance of diversity and difference as the unifying feature of EUrope, the EU motto seems able to negotiate between a modern liberal-cosmopolitan outlook and the values inscribed in regional and national customs and traditions. Besides EU policy elites and institutions, several leading public intellectuals have reproduced this frame in which notions in the semantic field of diversity, including difference and otherness, are understood as underlying a collective identity that appears distinctly EUropean. In ‘What Binds Europeans Together’, Jürgen Habermas and Derrida (2003: 294) hold that EUrope, leaving behind its fanatical divisions, ‘had to painfully learn how difference can be communicated, contradictions institutionalized, and tensions stabilized’. The acceptance of difference, instead of implying the impossibility of community, signals the opposite: ‘The acknowledgement of differences – the reciprocal acknowledgement of the Other in his otherness – can also become a feature of a common identity’. Similarly, for Ulrich Beck (2003), as he writes in ‘Understanding the Real Europe’, ‘“Europeanness” means being able to combine in one existence things that only appear to be mutually exclusive in the small-mindedness of ethnic thinking’. According to him, EUrope’s success is founded upon the cosmopolitan values of ‘radical tolerance and radical openness’, heralding a ‘new politics’ through which ‘Europe teaches the modern world that the political evolution of states and state systems is by no means at an end’. Moreover, as Delanty and Rumford (2005: 51) note, philosophers Edgar Morin and Hans-Georg Gadamer also felt that, instead of seeking to erase differences, the ‘unity of Europe lies in the unique capacity to cope with differences’. Borders, especially the visible and static ones that seem to separate between ‘them and us’ appear to necessarily stand in tension with the EUropean

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‘postnational constellation’ (Habermas, 2001) in which differences are the unifying ingredients of a distinct community, or following Zygmunt Bauman (2004: 7), even a distinct civilisation: It is perhaps because of such internalization of difference that marks Europe’s condition that [. . .] Europe came to be the birthplace of a transgressive civilization – a civilization of transgression (and vice versa!). We may say that if it is measured by its horizons and ambitions (though not always by its deeds), this civilization, or this culture, was and remains a mode of life that is allergic to borders – indeed to all fixity and finitude. It suffers limits badly; it is as if it drew borders solely to target its intractable urge to trespass. In this transborder or transgressive frame, EUrope comes to understand itself as somewhat otherless, not because there are no differences, but precisely because differences are acknowledged, even celebrated, and because there seems to be no constitutive others or outsides against whom and which one’s identity is formulated, merely other minorities. According to former Commission president Romano Prodi, such polity is based upon ‘[a] model of a consensual pooling of sovereignity [sic] in which every one of us accepts to belong to a minority’ (European Commission, 2000). And still, even if the united in diversity motto seems to allow for a combination of oneness and diversity, it ultimately forms a problematic idea/l. If the capacity to accept difference is what distinctively defines EUrope and EUropeanness, where are the limits that any distinction necessarily requires? Certainly, while those who speak in its name take a preconceived idea of where EUrope begins and ends for granted, drawing fixed lines seems nevertheless incompatible with EUrope’s ‘allergy to finitude’. When EUrope is conceived as an inherently transborder adventure/r, it appears to defy the age-old mechanism by which identity is constructed – identity, understood here according to Delanty and Rumford (2005: 51) ‘as a default term for group consciousness, collective “we” feelings’ that come about in ‘a relation of self and other by which the identity of the self is constituted in symbolic markers’. According to them (2005: 60), besides leaving unanswered the questions of how exactly ‘the recognition of diversity will lead to a collective identity and indeed why a collective identity is desirable’, the EU motto creates the contradictory situation of having to define a common European culture that is universal – but not so universal that it is global and thus not distinctively European – and at the same time does not negate national and regional cultures. If we agree with Delanty and Rumford (2005: 56) that the EU motto ‘has become the most influential expression of European identity today’, it exposes a serious

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dilemma at the heart of EUrope’s tale of itself that is starkly disclosed in its governance of mobilities. On the one hand, it concocts the image of a polity based on the overcoming of a ‘us’ versus ‘them’ logic, the freedom of movement, radical cosmopolitan openness, and the continuous transcendence of borders with universal appeal, while, on the other hand, having to justify, somehow, the existence of delimiting boundaries and their strict enforcement. How does EUrope come to terms with this disjuncture, and how does it seek to retain the transborder idea of itself? The diffusion of EUropean borders, their vacillation and emergence ‘everywhere’ (Balibar, 2004: 1), and the implication of a range of actors and levels of authority in governing them, have had the somewhat paradoxical effect of making it increasingly difficult to definitively discern the EUropean dimension in their enforcement. While Rumford (2008a: 54) is at least partially correct in observing that ‘Europe-defining’ borders ‘are becoming determined less by European nation-states than by the EU’, since it is the union that holds ‘the power to shift, dismantle, and construct new borders to an extent never possessed by the nationstate’, sight is often lost, including in critical scholarship, of how some aspects in their enforcement are, at least publicly, rendered EUropean and others national or not-so-EUropean. The EUropean border seems to possess the capacity to selectively camouflage. Or, put differently but to the same effect, the separation of borderwork into the authoritative realms of the nation-state and the supra-national sphere is often taken at face value and not critically scrutinised. The EU border agency Frontex is a case in point. It ‘represents the discovery of the European Union’s common external border as a space the EU is in dire want of gaining sovereignty over’ (Kasparek, 2010: 127), but such sovereignty is portrayed as being held exclusively by EU member states. Despite embodying the EUropeanised border like no other authority, and while understanding its mission as militaristic in form (Feldman, 2012), Frontex appears simply as the community’s border broker. Asserting that ‘border control is the exclusive responsibility of the Member States’, Frontex (2018) retains the allure of an objective and managerial agency advising EU member states, building their capacities, and providing them with intelligence and risk assessments so that they can enforce ‘their’ sovereign borders. And it retains such allure even in light of its drastically enhanced mandate and authority, its higher budget and enlarged personnel, following the ‘crisis’ of 2015, which, for the agency, now rebranded as the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, serves as the greatest opportunity in its history to become a fully fledged ‘European border police force’ able to ‘act independently’, as called for by German chancellor Merkel in June 2018 (Reuters, 2018). While, clearly, a neat separation between what is done by or on behalf of EU and member states is not maintainable, emphasising a supposed separation is one of the main mechanisms by which migrant suffering is dissociated from EUrope, ensuring deniability of its implication in anti-migrant violence. Italian and Maltese coastguards can be blamed for abandoning the distressed at sea, Greek borderguards

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for incarcerating newcomers in inhumane conditions, or Hungarian military forces for assaulting those in transit. That responsibility and blame for migrant death and harm is shifted onto member states appears less a one-sided imposition than, to a degree at least, a mutually acceptable form of ‘responsibility-sharing’ or ‘facesaving’. Despite, or rather because of the EUropeanisation of the border and the erosion of a supposedly national ‘monopoly of violence’ over a clearly demarcated national territory, the significance for member states to retain the appearance as ultimate enforcers of sovereign violence in questions of migrant admission or rejection should not be underestimated. We seem to witness how the EUropeanisation of the border coincides with a superficial recoding and (re-)nationalisation of border violence – one of the ways in which the frame of transborder (as well as humanitarian and post-racial) EUrope can stay somewhat intact. Visibilising EUrope in border violence As I have argued throughout the book, contemporary migrant struggles constitute not merely ‘border elements’ (Foucault, 2009: 215), simply inhabiting the junctures of un/ belonging, but are transversal forces that bring to light the ways in which constitutive insides and outsides are made and unmade, often forged through violent enforcement. Whereas in the accounts of EUropean policy elites and often also EU scholars, EUrope seems to be held together by a set of enlightened principles and an ethos or idea that defies limits, migrant resistances reveal concretely the moments and places where and for whom borders materialise, and when the right to belong to EUrope is denied and fought over, often corporeally and in the face of ruthlessly enforced exclusions and expulsions. They allow us to more clearly decipher the EUropeanness of the border. Given the entanglement but continuous resistance of the book’s many protagonists in a complex border regime, they exposed the forms of border violence that dominant EUropean frames seek to hide. Following their trajectories and struggles makes something tangible as EUrope without turning it into a static object (of analysis) but into a moving marker which establishes the connections between what seem, at times, disparate (national) forces, spaces, and spheres of responsibility. Pre-emptively illegalised through EU visa policies, the many individuals followed in this book were deflected onto dangerous paths where they would then encounter EU military missions at sea and on land, or non-EUropean allies enforcing deterrence policies based on EU-third country agreements. Those who survived and escaped interception were fingerprinted and registered on EUropean data bases – those who arrived more recently under the eyes of Frontex or European Asylum Support Office personnel at hotspots. The ‘data doubles’ there created followed them around through the Dublin regulation and ever-more EUropeanised intelligence sharing, severely curtailing and conditioning future movement, settlement, and well-being, often leading to temporary capture, confinement in EU-funded detention centres and exposure to (Dublin) deportations, at times carried out in

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Frontex charter flights. Through their acts of resistance – visible contestations, tenacious movements, or the creation of novel solidarities – they brought into play the EUropeanness of the border, certainly always with particular inflections: German-EUrope, Greek-EUrope, Mediterranean-EUrope. Dublin deportability was one of the main targets of the dissensual Non-Citizen struggle (Chapter 2) while the same regulation, or rather the reaction to its suspension for Greece, was one of the main causes of hardship for those stuck in Greek transit (Chapter 3). Their and others’ border subversions that led to the temporary disintegration of Greece as EUrope’s primary frontier zone prompted Turkey’s firm inclusion into EUrope’s deportation regime through the EU-Turkey deal that in turn propelled greater Greek push-back and Turkish interception efforts that precarious travellers at sea had to suffer through, at times in the presence of Frontex (Chapter 4). As a dynamically evolving political constellation, EUrope’s interwoven authorities, policies, and technologies governing mobilities and borders cannot be simply untied or neatly categorised as ‘national’ or ‘supra-EU-national’ – they have become EUropean – even if, and that is important, they are not always spoken of in the name of EUrope. EUrope’s opposition to Hungary’s barriers while, at the same time, offering support with its border management is consistent with the logic underpinning EUrope’s governance of unauthorised mobility as a whole: striking a balance between the need for ‘orderly’, exploitable, and restricted movement without appearing as a sovereign fortress that excludes the vulnerable and poor or segregates based on religious or racialised differentiation. If migration struggles are viewed as a grid of analysis, what emerges is a EUrope that while continuously displacing itself through diffused, externalised, and outsourced borders, also becomes discernible and intelligible – not as a fortress, but as a polysemic border regime that creates new spatialities through the governance of (unauthorised) mobilities. What comes into view, according to Tazzioli (2015: 10), ‘from the spatial effects of the array of policies for governing mobility [. . .] in an attempt to counterbalance the erratic presence of migrants’, is a ‘patchy Europe’. Patchy EUrope is a consequence, however, not merely of turbulent migrations but also the turbulence of EUropean borders. EUrope, Jawad (2014, personal communication, 20 April) told me, ‘is a real trap! One leaves one trap and falls into the next one’. When we closely follow the movements and struggles of the unauthorised, a selectively bordered EUrope emerges. By visibilising the forces and material effects of EUrope’s incredibly variegated border regime, migrant resistances help us decipher the contours of a polity that reserves the name of EUrope for its post-national characteristics, seemingly transcending and transgressing borders, while silencing, or ‘re-nationalising’, the violence that is inscribed in the making of its polity. What becomes exposed are all those borders, including the mobile Dublin borders and the temporary internal Schengen borders, that ‘may not appear as borders to all concerned’ (Rumford, 2008a: 42), remaining largely invisible or inconsequential for (most) EUropean citizens, while materialising for those who rarely feature in EUrope’s narratives of itself.

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Image 5.1 We are not terrorist – we want peace, Idomeni/Greece, November 2015 Source: L.M. for Moving Europe

Humanitarian EUrope When more than 360 Sub-Saharan Africans drowned on the 3rd of October 2013 near Lampedusa, then EU Commission President Barroso travelled to the Italian island and later gave an account of what he had witnessed: That image of hundreds of coffins will never get out of my mind. [. . .] Coffins of babies, coffins with the mother and the child that was born just at that moment. This is something that profoundly shocked me and deeply saddened me. I also saw the desperate eyes in many survivors, [. . .] [at] the reception centre [. . .]. I saw in some of them [. . .] also some hope, and I believe now we have to give reason for that hope. To show that that hope in the middle of this suffering can be justified. (European Commission, 2013) A year and a half later, in the aftermath of one of the largest shipwrecks in the recent history of the Mediterranean, leading to over 800 fatalities on the 18th of April 2015, the European Council (2015a) announced: The situation in the Mediterranean is a tragedy. The European Union will mobilise all efforts at its disposal to prevent further loss of life at sea and to

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About a year later, days after more than one thousand people had lost their lives at sea in several shipwrecks during the last week of May 2016, EU High Representative Mogherini said: The refugee crisis we are facing [. . .] puts our deepest values, even our identity to a test. It is a moment of truth to see if we are really Europeans and if we are really a union. (EEAS, 2016) The Mediterranean Sea, a space of seemingly never ending migrant tragedy, is EUrope’s ‘humanitarian border’ (Walters, 2011) par excellence. It is a space of suffering urgently requiring humanitarian intervention, or so we are told shipwreck after shipwreck. At the same time, the Mediterranean is also a securitised borderzone where those intruding are considered not only subjects at risk but also risky subjects (Aradau, 2003), always potentially ‘a life to be protected and a security threat to protect against’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2015: 3, emphasis in original). That humanitarian and governmental rationales are not antithetical to one another but have, at least at times, become deeply interwoven, has been observed for some time now, foremost by Didier Fassin (2012: 1) who has shown that ‘moral sentiments’, thus ‘the emotions that direct our attention to the suffering of others and make us want to remedy them’, are ‘an essential force in contemporary politics: they nourish its discourses and legitimize its practices’. Border enforcement in the Mediterranean constitutes, at least at first sight, one of the prime examples of ‘humanitarian government’, thus ‘the administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle which sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of action’ (Fassin, 2007: 151). Every EUropean intervention in the Mediterranean, ranging from increased surveillance to military anti-smuggling missions and collaborations with North African authorities, has been framed as humanitarian measures to end death at sea. Protecting not merely the lives of those seeking to ‘irregularly’ cross the maritime border but also ‘the border’ itself, appear not as incompatible but reconcilable aims, in the sense that increased militarised governance and surveillance would heighten the chances of detecting and rescuing migrants on unseaworthy boats. Even the absence, or selective presence, of EUropean assets can be justified in humanitarian terms, as appearing, for example, too close to the Libyan coast would, so the argument goes, risk lives by inciting migrants to cross, thereby playing into the hands of smuggling networks. Moreover, training and financing North African security forces and militias, even those that previously engaged in human smuggling themselves, would save lives by preventing migrants from needlessly risking theirs.

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That, as Feldman (2012: 83) notes, ‘EU officials speak fluently in the language of human rights’, has made it increasingly difficult for those prone to criticise EUrope from humanitarian registers to formulate a potent critique and avoid cooptation. For Vaughan-Williams (2015: 4, emphasis in original), the efficacy of mobilising humanitarian ideals for a critique of the negative consequences of border enforcement is thus put in doubt, leading even to a ‘crisis of humanitarian critique’. At the same time, many (migrant) activist networks have never bought into EUrope’s humanitarian rationalisation of its borderwork in the first place and have, if at all, utilised humanitarian critique merely strategically, in discursive confrontations and as one political tool among many. For them, including those associated with the NoBorder and No One Is Illegal movements, the humanitarian framing of EUrope and particularly its border activities have never been anything but ‘a smoke screen that plays on sentiment in order to impose the law of the market and the brutality of realpolitik’ (Fassin, 2012: 2). The allegation that the ‘real’ ambitions of EUrope’s border regime – deterrence of unwanted migrants at any cost – are simply and cynically hidden underneath a humanitarian veil, carries a lot of weight. After all, following every larger migrant shipwreck, gestures of sorrow and remorse are consistently connected to the further securitisation and militarisation of EUrope’s maritime borders. When Barroso returned from his visit to Lampedusa in 2013, he demanded the strengthening of EUrope’s surveillance system Eurosur. In light of the aforementioned April 2015 tragedy, the European Council announced a range of security measures, including the broadening of Frontex’s mandate and a more proactive fight against smuggling and trafficking networks in order to halt migratory flows. To avoid that people would ‘have to’ risk their lives at sea, unauthorised maritime migration would need to be pre-emptively stopped, even before reaching the North African coastline, as emphasised by Mogherini in her statement following the mass shipwrecks of May 2016: if we focus only on the Libyan sea-border, [and forget] about the Libyan land-border, we will never manage to solve the issue of the corridor. That’s why I have started an unprecedented dialogue with the countries of the Sahel. (EEAS, 2016) Given the continuous dying in the Mediterranean and the de-legitimisation campaign against humanitarian NGOs conducting rescue operations there, as well as the uncountable testimonies of mass atrocities in Libya, including by forces funded and trained by EUrope, one could conclude that EUrope’s desire to protect is little more than a rhetorical stunt, covering up its true intentions (Amnesty International, 2017). And still, while the depiction of humanitarianism as a smokescreen remains astute and politically potent in formulating a critique of the violence that emanates from EUrope’s borders, not least by allowing one to side-step ‘the ground already occupied by the EU’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2015: 4), there remains the need to better

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understand the complexity and ambivalence of humanitarian borderwork with a particularly EUropean inflection. The Mediterranean has become the paradigmatic site where the ‘humanitarian border’ has materialised, which, for Walters (2011: 138), forms ‘a novel development within [the] history of borders and border-making’. This particular border emerges in spaces that ‘can be likened to faultlines [. . .] where it seems that the worlds designated by the terms Global North and Global South confront one another in a very concrete, abrasive way’ (2011: 146). Besides the Mediterranean, the US-Mexico border and Australia’s maritime border constitute such humanitarian sites, and it should come as no surprise that – just like border technologies, infrastructures, and know-how – discursive and emotive strategies have begun to travel to and cross-fertilise these sites, leading to ‘the emergence of a transnational discourse of compassionate border security that fuses humanitarian and militarised logics’ (Little and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 535). Even so, and connected to its transborder frame, there is a case to be made that EUrope’s humanitarian border retains distinct characteristics, as I want to allude to through two brief exchanges between representatives of Australia and the US vis-à-vis those of EUrope that by no means allow for deep comparisons but are, nonetheless, at least indicative. First, as part of Australia’s notorious ‘No Way’ media campaign, Campbell, the commander of Operation Sovereign Borders, announced sternly in 2014: If you travel by boat without a visa, you will not make Australia home. The rules apply to everyone: families, children, unaccompanied children, educated and skilled, there are no exceptions. (Australian Government, 2013) When Australia’s then prime minister Abbott insinuated in April 2015 that there had been an official dialogue between the EU and Australia, the former showing interest in the latter’s resolute ‘No Way’ model of stopping boat migration, a Commission spokesperson swiftly reacted not simply by denying these exchanges but by also adding that, since the EU followed the non-refoulement principle under international law, ‘the Australian model can never be a model for us’ (EURACTIV, 2015). Second, in January 2017, as part of the US government’s anti-migrant agenda and in light of its desire to reinforce and extend its southern border wall to Mexico, the US government issued the executive order ‘Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States’, intending to bar people from seven Muslimmajority countries and halt all refugee admissions (The White House, 2017). In response, the EU High Commissioner Mogherini emphasised that this was neither ‘Europe’s’ nor the ‘EU’s’ way: we have in Europe a history – and here I think I do not speak only for the European Union – that has told us that every time that one invests in divisions

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and wars, you might end up being in a prison, if you build all walls around you. And we have a history and a tradition and an identity based on the fact that we celebrate when walls are broken down and bridges are built. (EEAS, 2017) Alluding to these reactions of EUropean officials to Australian and US border policies is not to put in doubt the transnationalisation of humanitarian sentiments in border governance, though we might still be some distance away from seeing a manifest ‘transnational norm of compassionate borderwork’ (Little and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 541). Rather, it is to emphasise an often-unacknowledged specificity of humanitarian practice and discourse in EUrope. After all, why do EUropean policy elites reject and distance themselves from the Australian and US ‘zero tolerance’ models that respond to movements which have been similarly constructed as both humanitarian crises and security concerns? What does EUrope’s strong opposition and critique reveal in particular given the many shared features in border enforcement across the three regional contexts, including blatant forms of refoulement? How can EUrope maintain this particular humanitarian frame, when, after all, its Mediterranean border is the deadliest in the world? Tracing the frame that constructs EUrope as humanitarian in the world is instructive when exploring these questions. Especially in its international outlook and foreign policy, EU institutions and officials have long shaped their role and identity as builders of peace and justice elsewhere, an image that has given rise to a range of interrelated (scholarly) concepts that cast the EU, and often EUrope/ Europe as such, as a force that is distinct from other global actors, especially the US. EUrope is said to deploy ‘soft’ rather than traditional ‘hard’ military or coercive means to achieve its goals and would act not merely as a ‘civilian’ but also a ‘civilising’, ‘ethical’, and ‘normative’ power in the world (Sjursen, 2006). Its self-conception as a supra-national polity, unique in its ability to achieve a condition of pooled and post-national sovereignty, is viewed as compelling EUrope to share learned lessons elsewhere and lead by example. In the words of Prodi: ‘We are not simply here to defend our own interests: we have a unique historic experience to offer. The experience of liberating people from poverty, war, oppression and intolerance’ (European Commission, 2000). Portrayed as the epitome of progressive norms and liberal principles, a community of values, EUrope seems well suited to promote them elsewhere, unusually under the heading of advocating for good governance, conflict resolution, and human rights. In the Treaty of Lisbon, it reads: The Union’s action on the international scene shall be guided by the principles which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement, and which it seeks to advance in the wider world: democracy, the rule of law,

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The normative foundation of the EUropean hybrid polity, Ian Manners (2002: 252) suggests, ‘predisposes it to act in a normative way in world politics’, so that, what shapes its international role most significantly ‘is not what it does or what it says, but what it is’. EUrope’s putative transborder design seems to compel and condition its involvement and intervention elsewhere to alleviate human suffering, in particular when the elsewhere is as close as the Mediterranean, troubled by a ‘humanitarian crisis’. The fact that EUropean policy elites have frequently depicted unauthorised cross-border movements as crises or in crisis to push through emergency measures that foster its control and influence in regions of strategic security interest, should not render the deployment of humanitarian sentiments purely instrumental and hollow distractions. EUrope’s maritime interventions are underpinned by a strategic logic that seeks to further consolidate the EUro-Mediterranean space as well as by, dare I say, a genuine belief that rescuing distressed lives is something EUrope does. For those who have a tendency to speak in the name of EUrope, the significance of humanitarian government’s ‘salutary power’ cannot be overstated – ‘by saving lives, it saves something of our idea of ourselves’ (Fassin, 2012: 252). Humanitarian government, which for Fassin (2012: 251) clearly represents the ‘religious aspect of the contemporary democratic order’, has a particular relevance for EUrope’s self-understanding. Its normative ontology and trajectory, seemingly guided by a mythical ‘idea of Europa itself’ (European Commission, 2012b), renders rescuing lives at sea a reflection of itself as an innately good force in world politics – EUrope is humanitarian because it is EUropean. Unlike the settler colonial states of Australia and the US that often display an aggressively celebrated pride in clear demarcations to an other in the name of sovereignty and the protection of a nation’s people, the crisis at EUrope’s doorstep is constructed as a test, a prolonged moment of truth determining whether EUrope can live up to the idea of itself. ‘Mediterranean Europe’, for Mezzadra ‘a site for a constituent imagination of Europe [. . .] where crucial challenges for the future of Europe are at stake’ (in Garelli, Sciurba and Tazzioli, 2018: 3), has become a space in which EUrope re-produces its humanitarian frame, before itself and the world. While migrant rescues by EUropean military assets are moments of rejuvenation, circulating en masse in the world media, what endangers the frame are not migrant fatalities per se. Rather than being invisibilised, EUrope has bemoaned the loss of (some) life ceremonially, in innumerable public displays of grief, often using these occasions to show remorse over having done too little in the past, having remained too

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passive for too long in light of a virulent crisis, while also pledging its enhanced military-humanitarian commitment (Stierl, 2016a). What seems essential, however, in retaining the image as humanitarian, is the avoidance of any direct association with acts of violence that may have had fatal consequences. Produced by others elsewhere, (well-meaning but rogue) EU member state authorities, but more commonly smuggling or trafficking networks, as well as foreign forces who fail to live up to the EUropean code, violence can never be of EUrope because EUrope has long overcome a form of governance that requires deadly force – ‘sovereignty’s old right – to take life and let live’ (Foucault, 2004: 241) – especially when directed against the precarious and vulnerable. When migrant lives are concerned, besides portraying the Mediterranean as a space where the EU, according to Alun Jones (2011: 41), ‘regards itself as having a natural legitimacy to act in order to ensure its own security [. . .] and stave off potential threats to European and global order’, the sea becomes also constructed as an inherently exceptional and dangerous space, not of EUrope, where lives are at risk not due to human-made systems and structures that have produced the phenomenon of unauthorised sea migration in the first place, but due to the unfavourable forces of nature at work, as well as the reckless behaviour of smugglers. Not least given the fact that migrant travellers are regularly constituted as natural forces themselves, the naturalisation of maritime migration and death at sea appears unsurprising. Connected to registers of fate, naturalising migrant deaths allows to dissociate them from human action and provides EUrope with a ‘moral alibi’, akin to what Roxanne Doty (2011: 607) observes in the US-Mexico context, where ‘geographic space has made it possible to suggest that the consequences in the form of migrant deaths result from “natural causes” [. . .] thus deflecting official responsibility’. Similarly depoliticising dissociations and radical de-contextualisations produce travellers at sea as passive subjects whose survival depends on the benevolent interventions of others, primarily EUrope, but increasingly also its allies. That many of the very same subjects who were cast as helpless victims while still at sea and rendered more biological than ‘biographical lives’ (Fassin, 2012: 254) – reduced to biological survival which ‘ultimately protects and encourages a limited and limiting notion of humanity’ (Ticktin, 2006: 42) – can swiftly be turned into illegalised and thus deportable migrants after disembarkation, undeserving of further protection, speaks to the selective, and if you will schizophrenic logic of humanitarian government, underpinned by a ‘minimalist biopolitics’ (New Keywords Collective, 2016: 28) that seeks to keep the life of the migrant intact enough to survive, but also intact enough to subsequently deport. EUrope’s humanitarian recognisability depends on the depiction of migrant travellers as politically impotent and infantilised subjects adrift at sea, as those who need to be rescued from their own risky and irrational choices and actions. Only if understood as such do they constitute ideal recipients of a politics of compassion that seems to be ‘increasing in inverse proportion to the migrant’s impact on the EU polity’ (Feldman, 2012: 107).

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And yet, even if EUrope’s policy elites and institutions tirelessly attempt to embed their Mediterranean interventions in compassionate narratives, the humanitarian border is never merely a one-sided or hierarchical construction but, as Walters (2011: 144) has emphasised, ‘a site of ambivalence and undecideability’. Seemingly an ideal space for lawlessness and EUropean impunity given its overlapping jurisdictional regimes and ‘unbundling’ forms of sovereignty (Sassen, 1996: 31), the Mediterranean has become a site of struggle where visibility, audibility, and the laws of the sea and refugee protection are claimed in complex maritime interactions (Mann, 2016). While Fassin (2012: 244) suggests that ‘[h]umanitarian reason is morally untouchable’, and while Feldman (2012) conceptualises humanitarian care as the inclusion and exploitation of the passive other in EUrope’s humanitarian project, Mediterranean border enforcements must necessarily entail contradictions. The ethnographic explorations of migrant resistances have shown that precarious travellers are more than biological lives waiting to be rescued. As the protagonists of (sea) migration, and not as passive cargo, they both shape and (thereby) contest EUrope’s humanitarian frame. Becoming a humanitarian problem In the Central Mediterranean Sea, ‘migrant captains’, rather than smugglers themselves, have become the principal drivers of boats, who regularly relay emergency signals via satellite phones after they have steered into international waters or those of EU member states. By making themselves audible and visible ‘in terms of a politics of the governed in which migrants demand to be objects of humanitarian concern’, they turn themselves into ‘a humanitarian problem that states cannot disregard’ (Tazzioli and Walters, 2016: 462). Even if humanitarian care seems essentially ‘directed from above to below, from the more powerful to the weaker’ (Fassin, 2012: 4), the ways in which travellers make their struggles at sea audible, as depicted in Chapter 4, show that humanitarian care can also be actively claimed. There have been many instances where rubber boats were intentionally deflated or passengers went overboard in order to force others to respond. In the Central Mediterranean, hundreds of precarious travellers have jumped into the sea in the presence of EUropean forces to avoid being returned to Libya by Libyan coastguards. Through these risky acts of becoming shipwrecked, they put their lives into the hands of others and demand EUropean care. Similar to the ‘necropolitical’ resistance the hunger striking Non-Citizens enacted on the streets of Munich (Chapter 2), who forced themselves into a regime of care that was never intended for them, travellers at sea re-articulate EUrope’s humanitarian frame through a ‘reversed discourse’ that is ‘parasitic on the “dominant discourse”’ through its reiteration (Baaz, Lilja and Vinthagen, 2017: 31–32). Undeniably forming expressions of desperation, they still and decisively generate new situations and dilemmas for EUrope’s border enforcers: either rescue ensues, and in the vast majority of cases disembarkation in

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EUrope, or abandonment at sea, and the possibility of facing accusations of severe violations of international, maritime, and refugee laws and conventions. In no other global frontier zone have NGOs and (migrant) activist networks created support and counter-surveillance structures to such degree, having been able to directly support the arrival of hundreds of thousands via the Mediterranean (Heller, Pezzani and Stierl, 2017). The non-governmental rescuers and activist networks are among a multitude of actors criss-crossing the Central Mediterranean with overlapping but also varying and conflicting agendas and jurisdictions – ranging from Frontex, Eunavfor Med, or NATO assets, those of EUropean, North African and Turkish state (coastguard) authorities to private cargos, cruises, leisure boats and ferries, as well as assets of smuggling networks and militias. Through the multiplication of witnesses and channels for the transmission of real-time testimonies, such as the Alarm Phone, the ability to create singular humanitarian narratives has receded. Practices of non-assistance, abandonment, or forcible pushbacks have become increasingly documented and challenged, certainly one of the main reasons for the recent criminalisation campaigns targeting non-governmental actors. These campaigns have prompted a decrease in non-governmental presence at sea, beginning with the confiscation of the Iuventa vessel of the NGO Jugend Rettet in August 2017 (Heller and Pezzani, 2018), and escalating in summer 2018 with the seizure of several non-governmental assets. While the forces seeking to erase non-governmental presence from these contentious borderzones seem to have gained the upper hand at the time of writing, in June 2018, it is clear that they will not succeed in erasing creative forms of civil disobedience at sea. Following Fassin, the term ‘humanity’ denotes two senses: First, humanity conceived as mankind supposes an entire human species while second, humanity thought as humaneness supposes a feeling of sympathy for one’s fellow. Humanity thus ‘implies that all lives are equally sacred and that all sufferings deserve to be relieved’ (Fassin, 2012: 248). At the juncture where humans are divided, differentially included or excluded, EUrope’s humanitarian borderwork seeking to ‘[hold] together in an uneasy alliance a politics of alienation with a politics of care’ (Walters, 2011: 145), cannot but entail ambiguities and paradoxes, with migrant resistance and solidarity struggles as primary forces of contestation. Through continuously changing migratory routes, unauthorised travellers, at least partially, determine not only where and how the humanitarian border emerges, they also take part in EUrope’s humanitarian framing themselves by claiming EUrope’s care or denouncing, though rarely, when it has not been given. The humanitarianisation of the EUropean border, then, is not merely an effect of narratives fostered by EUropean policy elites but a dynamic process in which migrant protagonists, their allies, as well as a range of other actors and forces play constitutive roles. In 2012, when the Nobel Prize Committee announced the EU as award-winner of the Peace Prize, the ‘Collective of Venticinqueundici’ (2012), a group including

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Tunisian mothers whose children had disappeared on their journeys to EUrope criticised the decision, suggesting that this distinctly EUropean ‘peace’ had been created at the expense of other life: ‘We contest this prize because a peace that implies those disappearances and deaths can’t be our peace’. Given the unabated dying in the Mediterranean, charges that EUropean humanitarianism constitutes nothing but a smokescreen will grow louder, and for those who speak in the name of EUrope, every attempt to control and reproduce the humanitarian frame will turn into ever-more inept, paradoxical, and grotesque performances. At the official commemoration of the fatalities of the 3 October 2013 shipwreck, survivors were prevented from attending the ceremony in Sicily. Kept in confinement on the island of Lampedusa and threatened by deportation, they could follow only from afar how representatives of EUrope and the Eritrean government buried their friends, relatives, and fellow travellers. Eritrean protestors in Sicily disrupted the ceremony, holding a banner that read: ‘The presence of the Eritrean regime offends the dead and puts in danger the living’ (Miller, 2013). If, as Edkins (2011: 14) writes, ‘the missing reveal the status of the rest of us’, such ceremonial spectacles around the missing reveal EUrope’s present condition. The reproduction of a humanitarian imaginary of EUrope in the very moment of burying its border fatalities cannot go without disruption. Two days after Barroso gave his emotional account of the

Image 5.2 Italian coastguards, on a Frontex mission, set a migrant boat on fire after disembarkation. Taken from Sea-Watch 2, July 2017 Source: Fabian Melber, Sea-Watch

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hundreds of coffins lined up on Lampedusa, the shipwreck of 11 October 2013 occurred. Given EUrope’s undeniably direct and recorded complicity in the loss of hundreds of lives in this instance, as discussed in the previous chapter, the impossibility of embedding the catastrophe into a humanitarian narrative led to its erasure, a chilling silence, broken only by survivors and allies whose actions and words haunt and distort EUrope’s humanitarian frame.

Post-racial and postcolonial EUrope Survivors of sea journeys through the Central Mediterranean who are rescued by EUropean authorities and not by the non-governmental fleet, often experience police interrogation while still on the vessel that steers towards Italy. In the quest to find smugglers, ideally a few from each boat, some individuals are taken aside for questioning by EUropean investigators. Commonly, survivors who appear the weakest and the most traumatised are chosen for interrogation, including those who have just survived a shipwreck.1 They return later, at times carrying wristbands saying ‘witness’, ‘suspect’, or ‘smuggler’ (Campbell, 2017). Arriving in one of the Sicilian harbours, the survivors disembark, escorted by Italian coastguard or police authorities and frequently now by Frontex agents, as well as representatives of international organisations, such as the IOM. Exhausted, they stand in line for their identification and registration. Although many know of the severe consequences of being fingerprinted in Italy, resistance seems increasingly futile. Those who refuse are made obedient, accounts of being beaten into submission are not uncommon. As Kindesha told me in August 2017, only months after being rescued by an NGO at sea and arriving in Italy: ‘The authorities forced me to give fingerprints, so what can I do? I told them I had the right to move, this is not my last destination. They said this is an order’ (2017, personal communication, August 9). Ordering people in line to extract, at times forcibly, physiological characteristics and store them in the European dactyloscopy database (Eurodac) aiming to limit or prevent ‘secondary movements’, ‘asylum shopping’, or ‘re-entry’ after removal, are everyday scenes in contemporary EUrope, rarely understood as anything but necessary and pragmatic procedures carried out in the name of the law, public order and safety, common-sensical necessity, and the sovereign prerogative to know and take note of those who enter. In these scenes in which the EUropean border is implanted in the disciplined bodies of exclusively non-white others that make them enduringly ‘out of place’ and ‘ontologically insecure’ (Browne, 2009: 134–135), and through which the ‘colonial present’ (Gregory, 2004) seems to appear so flagrantly before our eyes, questions over the racial dimension of EUropean border control are hardly raised. Or, if they are, they become easily dismissed as hyperbole. The difficulty to speak about the permanence and pervasiveness of race and racism in EUrope seems particularly striking in times of intensifying societal polarisation, mounting evidently around the arrival of

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migrant newcomers in 2015. In light of hundred-fold (arson) attacks on refugee accommodations and their inhabitants, the (electoral) gains and mainstreaming of far-right anti-migrant movements and parties throughout EUrope, and growing support for migrant containment, deterrence, and return policies, the absence of an audible discourse and debate on their explicitly racist dimensions and overtones is perplexing – EUrope seems to have merely a ‘migrant problem’, not a ‘race problem’ (Espahangizi et al., 2016). This absence may, however, not be all so surprising if we follow Goldberg’s (2009: 154) observation that ‘political racelessness’ has long been a particularly EUropean phenomenon. Racelessness does certainly not imply the absence of race or racism but, rather, the absence of a vocabulary and consciousness to account for their presence and persistence in society. Race, according to Goldberg and John Solomos (2002: 3), can be conceived as a medium by which difference is represented and otherness produced, so that contingent attributes such as skin color are transformed into supposedly essential bases for identities, group belonging and exclusion, social privileges and burdens, political rights and disenfranchisements. Racism as the act, or enactment, of identification and classification, constructs (a group of) humans as different, often along biological, national, ethnic, and/ or cultural ascriptions that create, and often account for and maintain, hierarchical power relations based on perceptions of superiority and inferiority. Goldberg (2009: 156) traces ‘racial europeanisation’, the refusal to acknowledge and come to terms with racism and its persistence in the EUropean context to the experience of the Holocaust – not merely the culmination of racist fanaticism and violence, but also a turning point, the moment in which race left the frame: ‘There is no racism because race was buried in the rubble of Auschwitz’. Leaving behind a period of feverish ethno-nationalism, the emergence of EUrope signalled a new beginning and a step towards a future in which pooled sovereignty and shared (institutionalised) responsibility would make a repetition of Auschwitz impossible. As the embodiment of a post-racial constellation and ethos, EUrope seems to exemplify what happens when no category is available to name a set of experiences that are linked in their production or at least inflection, historically and symbolically, experientially and politically, to racial arrangements and engagements. (Goldberg, 2009: 154) EUropean racelessness connects or coincides with the frame of EUrope as of inherent transborder or transgressive design that entails an imagined fuzziness of its borders and a peculiar sense of otherlessness, or, at least, what Paul Gilroy (2005: 432) calls ‘difference without hierarchy’. Given that race ultimately ‘is about the

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representation of difference’ (Goldberg and Solomos, 2002: 4) and since race as a political means and resource precisely constructs and cements hierarchical relations of superiority and inferiority, EUrope’s presentation of its differences as not irreconcilable but, to the contrary, as allowing for the creation of unity ‘among minorities’, importantly features also in its post-racial frame: by refusing to acknowledge its constitutive other, EUrope comes to appear not only as raceless but as the antidote to racism – a model to be exported into the world. Significantly, for many who speak in the name of EUrope, as discussed before, it is precisely in this professed absence of an essentialised other where one can locate EUrope’s distinctiveness. Following Beck (2003), The European conception of humanity doesn’t contain any concrete definition of what it means to be human. It can’t. It is of its essence that it be anti-essentialist. Strictly speaking, it is a-human, in the sense that one can be a-religious. The European idea of ‘man’ was formed precisely by casting off all the naïve conceptions of what it meant to be human that had been imposed on it by religion and moralizing metaphysics. EUrope’s ostensible ability to discard all naïve essentialisms and advance to a degree of anti-essentialised tolerance and diversity appears to be its distinguishing feature – it is what sets it apart, a EUropean trait. Understood in this way, the EU’s united in diversity motto is not, as Delanty and Rumford (2005: 65) suggest, ‘a doctrine of cultural relativism’, but, rather, a EUrocentric doctrine of cultural distinction. As with its transborder frame and the dilemma of having to violently enforce the borders of a supposedly cosmopolitan polity, the movement, presence, and resistance of the ‘other other’ expose the dilemma of having to draw distinctions to ‘other differences’ without negating its self-conception as a radically tolerant constellation. With reference to dominant narratives of EUrope’s diversity, Bhambra (2016: 192, 197) has made the incisive observation that scholars like Habermas and Beck have constructed ‘cosmopolitanism as antithetical to multiculturalism’, where the latter seems ‘to refer to the visible difference of populations within states’, while the former ‘is used to refer both to the differences between states as well as an overarching commonality of culture’. She notes (2016: 197): Cosmopolitanism acknowledges (national) differences within a common (European) cultural framework and, at the same time, posits its (European) cultural difference from those (non-European) others that are associated with the diversity that constitutes multiculturalism. The cosmopolitan cultural diversity of Europe, then, is counterposed to that constituted by and through multicultural others who are presumed to import their diversity into (and against) the cultural diversity already present in Europe.

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For Bhambra (2016: 197), it is not always apparent how some differences are understood as either multicultural or cosmopolitan, ‘except insofar as they map onto some notion of visible, that is, racialized – or, then, more recently, religious – difference’. Given the unspeakability of race and racial hierarchies in EUrope, what we see is a ‘post-racial’ manoeuvre – ‘the denial of the salience of race in the lived experience of the racialized’, which allows making the distinction between good (cosmopolitan) and bad (multicultural) diversity (Lentin and Titley, 2011: 79, 160). Seemingly paradoxical, it is the post-racial that enables racialised differentiations, mainly by mapping intolerance to a tolerant EUropean society onto ‘multicultural others’ (Bhambra, 2016: 188). In light of EUrope’s idea of itself as a non-racial and radically open polity, the mapping of ‘multicultural intolerance’ onto racialised and religious difference, and bodies, requires cautious engineering – it, after all, ‘charges the historically dispossessed as the now principal perpetrators of racism, while dismissing as inconsequential and trivial the racisms experienced by the historical targets of racism’ (Goldberg, 2015: 30). This post-racial reversal can be understood with Sivamohan Valluvan (2016: 2242), as ‘a unique hegemonic manoeuvre’: whilst civic and populist racisms alongside the complementary structural racial inequalities persist undeterred, there is no longer an ideological framework willing to stand for these disparities – given that the prevailing ideological and institutional apparatuses themselves so insistently assert that the time of race and racism has passed, triumphantly eclipsed by the full realization of liberal capitalism’s much anticipated ethos of radical individualism. The post-racial also engineers a unique historicization of the present, proudly appropriating the legacies of the Civil Rights, anti-colonial and anti-Apartheid victories of the twentieth century alongside the later campaigns that sought to win a greater prominence for non-white people in the cultural architecture of Western capitalism and its state institutions. According to Goldberg (2015: 24), the declaration of multiculturalism as a failed experiment was precisely the moment when the post-racial condition came to be, ‘as the cringe factor to multiculturalism’s perceived or projected excesses and failures’. For (past) EUropean leaders such as Cameron, Sarkozy, and Merkel, multiculturalism had cultivated a mere co-existence of communities, leading to parallel societies, a lack in social cohesion, and forming an ideal breeding ground for extremist (Islamist) ideologies. The post-racial, Goldberg (2015: 26) holds, came about ‘in the form of exhaustion with and rejection of multicultural policy’. As a thinly disguised discursive strategy and political instrument, expressions of ‘exhaustion’ with multiculturalism were the post-racially recoded rejections of the one considered ‘in but not of Europe’ (Hall, 2003). Pronouncing the transcendence

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of racial logics, and thus declaring a non-racial present, the post-racial silence around race has made discursive detours commonplace – we are not racist, but . . . In view of intensified (unauthorised) movements from regions of the Global South, post-racially ‘coded debates’ (Lentin and Titley, 2011: 12) have become prevalent in public discourse, in which the other’s supposed intolerance is designated a threat to the EUropean way of life. What seems at stake are EUrope’s liberal values, jeopardised by those who are portrayed as having not (yet) reached EUropean maturity, its universal values expressed through tolerance to difference (Brown, 2006). The designation of homophobia and patriarchy as a ‘migrant problem’, incompatible with EUropean values despite their tenacious presence throughout (white) EUropean societies, functions as one of the ways in which racialisations by proxy manifest. When severe acts of (sexual) harassment against women ascribed to young Muslim asylum-seekers or ‘illegals’ occurred on New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2015, they were made intelligible by alluding to their Muslim and Northern African cultural affiliation, heritage, and imprint, thereby consolidating long-standing and readily generalisable ‘ethno-sexist imaginaries of “Arab men”’ (Dietze, 2016, my translation). Rather than associating such ‘backwardness’ (simply) with unchangeable biological traits, there is, according to Karakayalı (2011: 100, my translation), a temporal dimension to the ‘liberal-emancipatory orientalism’ inscribed in ‘progressive Eurocentrism’, where the Muslim male is understood not as ‘completely other’, but as EUrope’s ‘alter ego, the dark side of the West’s self’, able to one day reach EUropean maturity. Now, notwithstanding that the post-racial has undoubtedly become a dominant frame through which EUrope narrates itself, ‘[concealing] within its conceptual erasure of race the driving mode of contemporary racist articulation’ (Goldberg, 2015: 152), recent migrations and their struggles have come to considerably disrupt this frame by bringing racialised exclusions vividly to the fore. Two of these disruptions are illustrated in turn: first, the ways in which ‘excessive’ intrusions into and movements across EUropean space have provoked border enforcement practices that cannot but be based upon racial stereotyping and profiling, and, second, the ‘dissensual’ interventions of migrant activists that have explicitly denounced the racial and colonial reverberations of the EUropean border regime. In the conclusion, I will allude to a third and significant disruption emanating from overtly anti-migrant racism which, rejecting the ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan post-racial narratives of EUrope, has escalated in reaction to the long summer of migration. Provincialising EUrope in racialised encounters The scenes in which the EUropean border is planted into the non-white bodies of the newly arrived, and in particular the violence utilised to make subjects (momentarily) obedient, may be largely hidden from sight, but the subsequent disobedient

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movements throughout EUrope, in breach of what the Dublin regulation stipulates, have brought along considerable challenges and consequences for EUrope’s mobility governors that cannot be that easily concealed. In order to capture, return, or deport, racialised policing seems unavoidable. When several of the preceding chapters’ protagonists collided with the EUropean border, their racialised perceptibility was one of the main factors for their encounters with forces of control. Jawad’s attempt to escape Greece brought him to Austria where, while waiting for a public bus with other travellers, they were detained – someone had notified the authorities based on the sight of a group of young non-white men at a bus stop. Jaser, wanting to return home to Germany and leave Greece a few years after Jawad, was violently prevented from boarding his flight despite proper documentation, simply due to his phenotypical racialisation as non-EUropean. His family, having to live for many more months in Athens, tried to remain under the radar, but too often ended up entangled in the nets of governmental border authorities due to their racialised visibility. Racial profiling, certainly a violation of human rights norms and EU law but found to be endemic in EUrope (Open Society Foundation, 2012), has become (further) EUropeanised in response to unruly migrations. In operations such as ‘Mos Maiorum’ (meaning ‘ancestral custom’), the largest of several EU joint police operations, supported by Frontex and involving twenty-six Schengen countries, information is gathered ‘on irregular migration flows’ (European Council, 2015b: 28). Between the 13th and 26th of October 2014, 19,234 ‘irregular migrants’ originating from 137 countries were intercepted at EUrope’s external and internal borders. The counter-mapping project ‘Map Mos Maiorum!’, set up to provide an account of location and form of the operation, reported of various instances of racial profiling throughout EUrope, and though, following the NGO Statewatch (2015), ‘the majority of reports submitted [. . .] were not independently verified, the prevalence of claims of profiling and apparently discriminatory activity is striking’.2 Concerted EUrope-wide police operations are certainly the exception. Much more common are everyday checks conducted by national border enforcers, especially along the ‘temporary’ internal Schengen borders, the results of which find their way into EUropean data bases. EUrope’s border regime constitutes what Arun Saldanha (2006: 11) has called a ‘racialised visual regime’, in which ‘phenotype does always matter somehow – to experience, imagination, and belonging, to interaction and the allocation of bodies’. Regardless whether one has been present over generations or merely for a week, all those unbelonging to EUrope’s ‘transnational white ethnicity’ (Hansen, 2004: 50) may find their way into a widely cast net. And that includes those who have long appropriated political spaces, rights, and representation after having arrived in EUrope over the past decades through post-colonial and guest worker migrations, composing what some have called the ‘post-migrant society’ (ElTayeb, 2016). EUropean border enforcement generalises and essentialises not

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merely the presumption of non-whiteness’ association with illegality and criminality but recreates racialised registers of who counts as EUropean and who does not – registers said to have long ceased to matter in EUrope’s post-racial frame. The idea of the European excludes those historically categorized as nonEuropean, as being not white. You are here but don’t (really or fully) belong. Your sojourn is temporary, so don’t grow too comfortable. Hence the constant drumbeat about sending ‘them’ back. (Goldberg, 2009: 167) In order to capture unauthorised migrant presence and movement, and by acting upon deep-seated imaginaries of EUrope’s often unacknowledged constitutive (multicultural) other, border enforcement’s reliance ‘on sensory – especially visual – signals which, when indexed as proxies of race, spark distinctive judgements of people whose differences are considered essential to their identity’ (Amin, 2010: 8) means that the mask of the non- or post-racial has to fall. Post-raciality’s colourblindness and ‘illusion that the dream of the non-racial has already been realized’ (Goldberg, 2015: 180), evaporate in such scenes of EUrope’s ‘racial purging at the border’ (Browne, 2009: 145), especially now that its borders re-appear so viciously throughout EUropean space, wherever non-white bodies are forced into collisions. The quest to send ‘them’ back is not a straightforward task but replete with obstacles, frustrations, and (unintended) consequences – race ‘refuses to remain silent’ (Goldberg, 2009: 155). The sifting out of those who are not meant to remain is the attempt to erase the ‘facts on the ground’ that unauthorised travellers have created (see Chapters 6 & 7). Their prior infractions of the EUropean border, where neither EUrope’s smart borders nor its migration managers were able to prevent cross-border movements, prompt re-active and heavy-handed border enforcement practices that appear where they are not meant to be seen. Meant to take place elsewhere, at external or further externalised borders, the filtering out of the ‘wanted from unwanted, the barbarians from the civilised, and the global rich from the global poor’ (Van Houtum, 2010: 958), is becoming an increasingly ubiquitous spectacle throughout EUropean space and therewith also prone to be contested through acts of resistance and solidarity. In the case of Mos Maiorum of 2014, details on the operation were leaked in advance so that multi-lingual ‘travel warnings’ were issued by (migrant) solidarity networks, drawing unwanted attention to the EU police operation and its use of racial profiling that were subsequently widely criticised, leaving the European Council (2015b) wondering why ‘[f]or unknown reasons, the Joint Operation “MOS MAIORUM” captured the attention of the mass media’. Migrant movements, following Mezzadra (2010b), ‘are displacing and decentering Europe on the level of everyday life. They are provincializing it, to put it with Dipesh Chakrabarty’. Far from its cosmopolitan self-image, provincial

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EUrope emerges in migrant struggles against their policing and racialised othering. Those multicultural others, while not often ‘seen as constitutive of Europe’s own self-understanding’ (Bhambra, 2016: 188), force their racialised differentiation into the story of EUrope, disturbing the narrative of racelessness and post-raciality (El-Tayeb, 2011). In these everyday scenes of border enforcement and contestation throughout EUrope, the virulence of phenotypical racism that functions ‘alongside biological and cultural scripts of race’ (Amin, 2010: 9), comes to the fore, and therewith the deep-seated imaginary of who constitutes a EUropean and who does not. What also emerges are instant ‘visual associations’ (Spijkerboer, 2017: 1) with a EUropean legacy of racialised mobility governance and segregationist policies usually ‘considered to have taken place elsewhere, outside of Europe, and so [are] thought to be the history properly speaking not of Europe’ (Goldberg, 2009: 155). Vocalising EUrope’s umbilical connection EUrope’s forgotten history, allowing for its post-racial frame, was uncovered by the Non-Citizens in 2013 when they put their bodies on the line to struggle for inclusion into German-EUropean citizenship (Chapter 2). Breaking with the logic of the ‘grateful’ migrant subject (Moulin, 2012), they claimed their right to remain not predicated on an ‘expert’ assessment of their legal right to asylum or the generosity of the EUropean polity and its people, but on past forms colonial and imperial violence and their lasting reverberations. They understood themselves as the ‘harvest of empire’ (De Genova, 2016: 79). In a pamphlet entitled ‘European States are not in the position to render a judgement about our forced migration!’, the Non-Citizens (2014c) wrote: We are here because we were forced here. We come precisely from those countries that Western states regard as primary resources and a market for cheap labour forces; countries in Africa, South-Asia, the Middle East, Central- and South-America. Countries whose identities are interlinked with exploitation, colonialism, war, poverty, tyranny, sanctions, discrimination. Our history is a testimonial of these crimes. We are ourselves the living and talking evidence for exploitation and oppression. For the migrant activists, their very being and presence within EUrope formed ‘evidence’ of continuous EUropean/Western oppression: ‘Looking carefully at the asylum-seeker’s face, we will see the traces of imperialism’ (Non-Citizens, 2013b). In its self-perception a peaceful, normative, humanitarian, and post-racial polity, EUrope is largely understood ‘as a non-colonial, a-colonial or sometimes even as an anti-colonial project’ (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 5), which, if taken at face value, renders the claims voiced by the Non-Citizens imprecise at best or disingenuous at worst. The claim we are here because you were there has

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been confidently voiced by migrant (rights) movements for decades, but does the ‘umbilical connection’ that Stuart Hall (2014) made out between ‘“our there-ness” and “their here-ness”’, remarking that ‘[t]here is no understanding Englishness without understanding its imperial and colonial dimensions’, also hold true for the political formation of EUrope? Is there no understanding of EUropeanness without understanding its collective imperial and colonial dimensions? According to Hansen and Jonsson (2017: 5), colonialism has not merely been a national-imperial endeavour, as often assumed, but has played a pivotal role also in processes of European (and later EUropean) integration and unification, noting that ‘most efforts to unify Europe from 1920 to 1960 systematically coincided with efforts to stabilize the colonial system in Africa’. When the European Economic Community (EEC) was created by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, many of its founders were advocates of ‘civilising missions’ in Africa. Many agreed that only through the incorporation of Africa and its resources, Europe could be turned ‘into a viable geopolitical and geo-economic power bloc able [. . .] to compete with the emerging superpowers to the East and West’ (Hansen and Jonsson, 2017: 6) and that, moreover, such incorportion would hamper the anti-colonial drive generated by the 1955 Asian-African or Afro-Asian Bandung Conference in Indonesia. In particular the idea of ‘Eurafrica’ appealed to many of the founders as it, according to Hansen and Jonsson (2017: 6), appeared to generate two symbiotic benefits: the new geopolitical sphere that would comprise a united Europe would be sustainable and prosperous thanks to its incorporation of Africa; and correspondingly, the bonds between onceantagonistic European states would be strengthened by the shared goal of African development. The unification of Europe and a unified European effort in Africa were processes that mutually presupposed one another. Three of the EEC’s six founding member states were colonial powers which meant that ‘the new European community now located more than three-fourths of its land area outside of continental Europe’ (Hansen and Jonsson, 2017: 11–12). The case of colonised Algeria is particularly telling, where France waged its devastating war against Algerian independence until 1962, causing more than one million deaths. Colonial Algeria, belonging formally to France and thus becoming part of the EEC, remained nonetheless peculiarly outside of the emergent supra-national polity. This allowed, according to Bhambra (2009: 74), ‘the violence in Algeria not to be recognized as occurring within the European polity even when the war is one of independence from France and, as such, from the European project’. Moreover, it made possible the denial of the freedom of mobility to French-Algerian citizens. For Bhambra (2017: 404), this is revealing for it shows that ‘the European project can be seen to have been a racialised project from the very outset and mobility was once again delimited by race’.

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While EUrope’s lasting global territorial presence testifies to the direct implication of Europe and EUrope in colonial conquests, it constitutes an open secret, all but erased from EUropean historiography. Bhambra (2009: 72) urges to look at the shifting map of EUrope that tells the story of EUrope’s colonial relations: While the European Union’s borders receded to north of the Mediterranean by 1962, with the independence of most African countries from European rule, they returned once more to Africa with the accession of Spain in 1986 and the inclusion of its African colonies into the EU [. . .]. With the accession of the United Kingdom in 1973 the borders of the EU extended further to China and the Pacific Ocean, and, with Portugal’s entry in 1986 and its establishment of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries a decade later, further strengthened European associations with countries in South America and Africa. These territorial holdings belie the typical representations of the European Union as being congruent with the commonly perceived geographical borders of Europe. For Bhambra, the silence on EUrope’s colonial legacy and its role in constituting contemporary EUrope will persist as long as it is not thought from (non-EUropean) and global perspectives. Inasmuch as EUrope’s raceless self-understanding makes it impossible to conceive of EUrope as truly post-racist, ‘it is precisely the failure of Europe to understand itself in terms of colonialism that makes it impossible for it to understand itself as postcolonial’ (Bhambra, 2016: 199). Migrant resistances, embodied in everyday border transgressions or through vocalised dissent, may allow to break with such silence and conceive of EUrope from these other perspectives. If dissensual claims such as those voiced by the Non-Citizens are taken seriously, possibly understood as counter-narratives and ‘epistemic insurrections’ (Medina, 2011: 11), we may work towards counteracting EUrope’s amnesia when it comes to its collective colonial legacy, an amnesia so pivotal for the continuous construction of EUrope as both postcolonial and postracial. For Rigo (2005: 5), ‘the migrant subject’, not EUrope, ‘is a post-colonial subject: both as a legacy of colonial history and because migrant subjects radically contest the “place” assigned to them’. EUrope’s postcolonial and post-racial frame based upon the constant re-narration of ‘a myth, a foundational tale of pure origins [. . .] which sets in place the main elements of a wishful and idealized European identity’ (Hansen and Jonsson, 2014: 5), is ruptured when boats land on the Canary Islands or when Sub-Saharan travellers climb the fences of Ceuta and Melilla, showing the contentious presence of EUrope in spaces usually not conceived as of EUrope. As Hansen (2004: 57–58) notes, For Brussels to truly recognise its ‘non-European’ domains would presuppose that the EU was ready to explain, debate and come to terms with the historical as well as current relationship between European colonialism and European

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Image 5.3 Protest at occupied Oranienplatz, Berlin/Germany, June 2013 Source: Oliver Feldhaus

integration. If one picks out just one among the multitude of subjects for such a debate, the EU would need to start pondering the external as well as internal implications of an identity politics that extols ‘Europe’ and the ‘European’ without first reflecting on the fact that colonialism’s crimes of genocide, slavery and exploitation were also carried out in the name of Europe and justified with reference to the racial and cultural superiority of Europeans. When those arriving in Sicilian harbours contest the Dublin containment regime and cross into other EUropean spaces, or when the Non-Citizens tear up their residence permits, break the residence law by crossing inner-German boundaries, and loudly claim their presence, are they not the ones who, in word and act, create the umbilical connection between their here-ness and EUrope’s historic and present there-ness?

EUrope, a dilemma What does this word ‘EUrope’ mean, and what will it signify tomorrow? In its dominant meaning-making narratives, EUrope forms a post-national and normative polity that has come about in an ethos of peaceful border transgression, cosmopolitan openness, and enlightened racelessness. To those who are usually excluded

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from such narratives, including the protagonists of this book, this ethos and tale of EUrope would be completely meaningless, incomprehensible, and alien, worlds removed from their own experience of EUrope. Walters (2009: 487) rightly suggests that one ‘cannot point to a place, state or continent called Europe which readily reveals its borders, edges or divisions to an impartial observer’, but by following migration struggles as diagnostics of EUrope, borders, edges, and divisions are revealed through their contestation. In this way, EUrope becomes articulated not in its grand narratives but differently, as a polity and space of racialised ordering and othering, of barriers, traps, and violent collisions that may materialise only for some while remaining invisible or inconsequential for others. It may well be that this EUrope is simply one among a ‘plurality of Europes within discontinuous regimes and practices of knowledge’ (Walters and Haahr, 2005: 139), so that it could be situated – maybe as ‘selectively bordered EUrope’ – among the plethora of concepts that have come about in the attempt to conceptually navigate contemporary EUrope: polycentric or network EUrope, multi-level governance EUrope, EUrope as borderland or empire, EUrope of different speeds and differential integration, of core and periphery. And yet, the question of migration and borders in and around EUrope seems inextricable to all these EUropes, implicated in any conceptual vocabulary that seeks to come to terms with Balibar’s question about what this word means and what it will signify tomorrow. Whether or not migrant resistances are able to break EUrope’s dominant frames is open to question, and doubt, given the preeminence of EUrope’s own narratives as well as counter-narratives from the populist and extreme right that become increasingly normalised and part of EUrope’s own tales. But, at least, they call EUrope’s frames into question, and to do so is ‘to show that the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable’ (Butler, 2009: 9). When the migrant other rebels, the one commonly silenced and relegated to the outside but nonetheless constitutive of the inside sets something into motion, exposes some of the orchestrating designs of EUropean authority, and uncovers frictions, contradictions, and fallibilities that even dominant frames must entail. According to Butler (2009: 9): The frame never quite determined precisely what it is we see, think, recognize, and apprehend. Something exceeds the frame that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that does not conform to our established understanding of things. A certain leakage or contamination makes this process more fallible than it might at first appear. In their variety of shapes, borders are themselves framing devices, and by exposing their EUropeanness, by subverting and protesting them, migrant struggles trouble our sense of EUrope, its very location and reach, its design and meaning.

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And in so doing, they contaminate the reproduction of dominant narratives and imaginaries. In times when ‘Europe is increasingly seen as a space of encroachment, instability and uncertainty’, as having ‘lost its lustre as a place of progress, security and solidarity’ (Lewis and Amin, 2017: 2), not merely migrant resistances are dismantling its dominant frames. Shouting deafeningly in the name of the nation and/or (a white Christian) EUrope, and finding more and more listeners, nationalists and ‘patriotic Europeans’ (De Genova, 2015b) have also come to challenge narratives of EUropean transborder openness, its cosmopolitan values and humanitarian outlook. Their ‘postcolonial or post-imperial melancholia’ (Gilroy, 2005: 434) stems at least in part from a rejection of progressive post-racial tales cherished by many of EUrope’s (policy) elites. Seeking to return to the nation or a EUrope mythologised ‘as a racial formation of whiteness’ (De Genova, 2017a: 21), contemporary EUrope as seen through its own dominant narratives, becomes for them, as Amin (2017: 91–92) writes, ‘the totem of all that stands in the way of the homely’: Now migrants – their presence, needs and rights – are cast as the prime threat to national security, well-being and cohesion, and Europe is cast as the unruly space that allows this threat to grow. Not every image of EUrope is cast in this way, however. What has lost its appeal for some is the image of EUrope as migrant, as cosmopolitan nomad without sharp edges in a globalising world – entirely unsurprising when the unruly migrant has come to signify and symbolise crisis. What is sought, instead, is a ‘homely’ EUrope, following ‘a traditionalist or primordialist version of the definition of Europeanness’ (Schierup, Hansen and Castles, 2006: 12). A EUrope, in which one adheres to a EUro-national Leitkultur (a dominant or leading culture), where ‘one shakes each other’s hand’ and ‘we show face – we are not Burka’, as Germany’s Interior Minister de Maizière noted in 2017 (Zeit Online, 2017, my translation). The longing for the ‘return’ to order, tradition, and a time when borders still seemed to guard against an ‘increasingly brown tinge, oil polluting the water, seeping through and across the map of European whiteness’ (Goldberg, 2009: 186), is expressed throughout EUrope in the disciplining of the migrant, or those mistaken as migrant. And while far-right movements, such as Front National, AfD, Golden Dawn, Fidesz, Lega, the Identitiarians, and others cast cosmopolitan EUrope as the enemy, they themselves also carry imaginaries of greater EUrope, to be constructed through ‘right-wing nationalist populisms under an incipient formation of Europeanism’ (De Genova, 2015b). When we listen closely to the protagonists of this book, and follow their racialised collisions with the border regime, we detect that the dichotomy routinely made between ‘tolerant’ and ‘intolerant’ EUrope – a post-national EUrope of supposed cosmopolitan openness vis-à-vis a close-minded one composed of

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insular nation-states – is not necessarily so dichotomous. We begin to see how dominant EUropean frames conceal the violence that has long been levied against its others in the making of EUrope, even if not always in its name. Though it is impossible to make such distinction in the first place due to their entanglement, both ‘post-national’ EUrope and the EUrope of ‘nation-states’ have created the predicament the protagonists of this book found themselves in, as well as the conditions that have led to the death, disappearance, and suffering of so many others. Might it be that the now all-too-common blame-game directed against EUrope (or, rather, its institutions, its post-national habitus and narrative, and all those conceived as ‘EUrope-friendly’) is nothing but the effect of a concealment, the consequence of not seeing how those dying of dehydration in the Saharan desert, those tortured in Libya, those drowning in the Mediterranean, as well as those detained and humiliated within EUrope – often granted merely the ‘paradoxical liberty “to go anywhere except where one wants to go”’ (Bigo, 2007: 26) – bear traces of EUrope? Has what De Genova (2017b: 2) describes as the ‘fervent invention and fortification of a new border around the newly reunited “Europe” [. . .] understood to be nothing less than yet another re-drawing of the global colour line’ not been explicit, and explicitly EUropean, enough? Has, in other words, the selective visibility of EUrope’s diffused and often abstract/ed apartheid borders, their displaced violent enforcement, now come to haunt its dominant tales? The charge levied by the political right that ‘tolerant’ EUrope had ‘invited’ those migrant others, an absurd claim bordering on the comical, demonstrates that the dominant framing of EUrope has somewhat successfully established the chimera of EUrope as a polity with fuzzy boundaries, underpinned by radical tolerance and openness. This self-produced dilemma of EUrope and its ‘unresolved identity crisis’ (El-Tayeb, 2008: 650) will not be solved by returning to ‘cosmopolitan EUrope’ – this EUrope has never existed. Such attempt would be based on a false equation and offer a false alternative (more EUrope meaning less nation-state meaning less anti-migrant violence). A real alternative might open up when we listen seriously to migrant struggles. For many decades now, but in particular following the break through EUrope’s borders in 2015, they have created facts on the ground throughout EUrope, and many will follow the footsteps of these new EUropeans. What they tell us about contemporary EUrope in their resistance to its border-making, showing how EUropeanisation has always coincided with borderisation and violence, may prompt, on the one hand, the de(con)struction of EUrocentric narratives and thereby the creation of new and ‘radically democratic’ spaces in which alternative narratives can be told. And, they may prompt, on the other hand, inspiration for material transformations that they themselves have embodied and enacted through their disobedient movements into and across EUrope.

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Notes 1 I received this piece of information on 10 March 2017 in Palermo/Italy through a staff member of a major human rights organisation involved in the process of disembarking migrants in Sicily. The name of the staff member and of the organisation will remain anonymous. 2 The Mos Maiorum online map has been taken down. I want to thank Chris Jones from Statewatch for providing me with the spreadsheet of all the recorded incidents.

6

Analytics of power

‘The colonial world’, Franz Fanon (2003: 37) writes, ‘is a world divided into compartments’, separated into native and European quarters. Though ‘cut in two’, that which divides the colonial world is not a hermetic seal – the native, ‘[embodying] history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters’ (2003: 39–40). For Fanon (2003: 37–38), a close examination of this compartmentalised system would not only ‘reveal the lines of force it implies’, but also ‘allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized’. By tracing some of today’s disobedient movements into forbidden EUropean quarters, this book has sought to conceive of their surging and struggle as that which reveals the border regime’s lines of force and lines of fracture, different dominant frames of EUrope, and, possibly, the contours of a less divided and less violently organised future. Coming up, time and again, against forces of capture and control, they brought to light not merely compartmentalised spaces, but also the diffuse modalities of power that work and converge to maintain their segregation. Migration struggles, as ‘analytics of power’ (Foucault, 1998: 90), able to expose the different modalities of power that come into play in the governance of migration, could also be understood akin to the way Amin (2010: 18) describes ‘the long struggle against apartheid’ in South Africa: while no one knew when the monstrous regime would fall, its opponents gradually came to know its historical, systemic, visual, discursive and emotive structure, slowly piecing together a counter-machinery to wear it down through many inventions of boycott, subversion, protest, strike, reform, ridicule and defiance. While they may not compose a concerted ‘counter-machinery’ able to end the planet’s compartmentalisation and its global apartheid conditions in the way resistances ended South Africa’s system of segregation, migration struggles help piece together insights on the forces that continuously make and re-make EUrope’s segregationist regime. Getting to know the regime, its mechanics of operation, and its vast repertoire of violence is crucial in the struggle towards its undoing.

164 Analytics of power This chapter begins with a brief outline of Foucault’s take on the sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical modalities of power, followed by an account of EUropean border enforcement practices that seem paradigmatic of a thoroughly biopolitical regime – the biometric tracking of (mobile) populations. However, not least given the resistance of targeted subjects, such biopolitical tracking is required to conscript forms of violence that are not commonly associated with those of biopolitics, thus raising the question of how to come to terms with a regime that seems able to hold together modalities of power that appear in tension with one another. The chapter then turns to the notion of dispositif, showing how it serves as a framework to conceive of a constellation of power that contains seemingly incompatible imperatives, as exemplified by the (policy) alliance between liberal laisser-faire and security imperatives. This alliance is, nonetheless, fragile, especially in light of the unruliness of migration and the brutal force it takes to counteract it. Rather than a smoothly operating biopolitical system of mobility control, EUrope’s regime requires the racialised death function as well as the disqualification of death from what is considered EUrope’s nominal political sphere. While this dilemma seems to find a spatial resolution, migrant struggles bring to light the injurious and deadly violence that is meant to be eclipsed.

Modalities of power Resistance, for Foucault (2000c: 168), ‘really always relies upon the situation against which it struggles’. The ‘situation’ itself is not static but changes and, with it, configurations and strategies of power, connected to regimes of knowledge and truth. Gilles Deleuze (1988: 26) once characterised Foucault as a ‘new cartographer’ whose analysis and mapping of forces ‘throws up a new topology which no longer locates the origin of power in a privileged place, and can no longer accept a limited localization’. Searching for easily localisable sources or centres – the ‘King’s head’ (Foucault, 1980b: 121) – would be to ignore the multi-dimensional reality of power, as well as the various, at times micro-physical, forms that it can take. For Foucault (1998: 90) ‘if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical framework of its operation’, one would have to ‘break free of [. . .] the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty’. His sketch of a trajectory of power from sovereign via disciplinary to biopolitical and governmental modalities, seems to suggest for some that the forms of violence associated with sovereignty and discipline are no more in today’s biopolitical times, or, at least, that they are on the retreat. Before turning to the ways in which migrant struggles confront, expose, and modify certain forms of power, and their mechanisms of violence, the three main modalities of power associated with sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics are briefly reiterated. Sovereignty has been said to have receded in times of neoliberal globalisation and the emergence of post-national or supra-national political formations, and with

Analytics of power 165 it the form of power most closely associated with sovereignty: ‘to take life and let live’ (Foucault, 2004: 241). For Foucault (2004: 240), ‘sovereignty’s old right’ refers to the sovereign’s punitive privilege to decide over matters of life and death to an extent that it was only ‘thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive or, possibly, the right to be dead’. In this sense, the subject came into being only through the sovereign will and decision to either end or allow (obedient) life: ‘at the moment when the sovereign can kill [. . .] he exercises his right over life’ (2004: 240). While such sovereign power saw two wide-reaching ‘adjustments’, which Foucault (2004: 250) once awkwardly called ‘the body-organismdiscipline-institutions series, and the population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State’, its repressive violence has not simply disappeared. Disciplinary power, as one of these ‘adjustments’, took hold in eighteenthcentury Europe, with the introduction of regulatory techniques aimed at influencing and shaping individual and collective social behaviour. As a power that ‘centers on the body, produces individualizing effects, and manipulates the body as a source of forces that have to be rendered both useful and docile’ (Foucault, 2004: 249), it differs from sovereignty’s brute, bloody, and forbidding force that punished by inflicting pain or ending life. Under the subtler disciplinary regimes, the human body became treated as a (economic) resource and machine, whose subjection to ‘systems of efficient and economic controls’ (Foucault, 1998: 139) entailed constant processes of examination, surveillance, and modulation. Spaces of confinement and (panoptic) institutions such as the school, the factory, military, prison, and hospital, embodied such ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’ (Foucault, 1998: 139, emphasis in original), through which bodies and minds were supervised, controlled, trained, and ultimately normalised and disciplined. Forming according to Foucault (1998: 139) ‘somewhat later’, bio-power constituted the second ‘adjustment’, focussing ‘on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as a basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity’. While disciplinary anatomo-politics individualised and trained bodies, this power interfered in ‘bio-sociological’ processes, seeking to regulate ‘man-as-species’ (Foucault, 2004: 242, 142–143, emphasis in original): For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence [. . .]. Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over who the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. [. . .] [O]ne would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.

166 Analytics of power This novel biopolitical concern for life resulted in a shift to population ‘as the final end of government’ (Foucault, 2009: 105). While sovereign and later disciplinary authority relied on ‘the exercise of a will over others in the most homogenous, continuous, and exhaustive way possible’, requiring docile, passive, and punishable subjects, the emergence of population as a problem of government demanded different modes of intervention and regulation, a secularised ‘pastoral power’ governing through guidance and freedoms instead of oppressions, a power ‘from which we have still not freed ourselves’ (Foucault, 2009: 66, 148). For Foucault (2009: 108), it was in these transformations that the state’s modern ‘art of government’, or governmentality, came into being, that would ‘exercise [a] very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’.

Biometric beatings According to Deleuze (1992: 3, 7), and more generally a point often made in governmentality scholarship (Walters, 2017), contemporary ‘societies of control’ are not governed through the sovereign model and its power ‘to rule on death rather than to administer life’, and decreasingly by the disciplinary model with its enclosed spaces, but, rather, through elusive though ever-present forms of governmental control: ‘what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation’. The EUropean border regime has often been conceived as a prime example of population management through biopolitical control, that sorts, according to Rygiel (2010: 13), via regimes of ‘citizenship as biopolitics’, entire ‘populations through the construction of desirable and undesirable citizens, non-citizens, and abject populations’. Taking on global scope, its governmental management seems to know no bounds, so that some, including De Genova (2017a: 24) and Van Houtum (2010: 964), have begun to speak of the emergence of a ‘planetary regime dedicated to the neoliberal and postcolonial government of human mobility’ that has no outside – ‘the globe is the playing field of the EU’s border regime’. The biopolitical border seems to operate through a rather delocalised and disembodied system, more through a computer than a physical barrier, underpinned by what are portrayed as valueneutral and objective assessments made in accordance with legal and humanitarian standards (Geiger and Pécoud, 2010). Possibly best exemplifying such EUropean tracking of peoples’ positions with global scope are the ever-more pervasive filters, such as visa or entry/exit systems (European Parliament, 2017b) that turn the border increasingly digital and biometric, which, according to Amoore (2006: 348, 346), constitutes ‘an extension of biopower’ that would progressively ‘foreclose the possibility of public critique’. Also for Scheel (2013: 591, 596), the progressive technologisation of the border

Analytics of power 167 has modified ‘the encounters and power relations between migrants and border control authorities’, as the latter no longer need to rely on the former’s ‘narratives as a source of truth’, significantly reducing room for manoeuvre. Such ‘migration technologies’, according to Dijstelbloem, Meijer, and Besters (2011: 11) have come to target the body, whose ‘[b]ones, voices, DNA and fingerprints service as the new identity documents’. For them, even if such technologies, including biometric fingerprinting, are not ‘completely error-free’, given the potential for incorrect storage or readings, ‘migrants have a weak position in the everyday practice of migration policies with little means to check or to correct data that are gathered from them’ (2011: 14). The stories of people on the move, as recounted in this book, show that while impacted by these governmental and globalising technologies and systems that directed them onto paths that certainly were significantly longer, costlier, and far more violent than ‘regular’ ones, they continued to cross borders and move on (Mainwaring, 2016). Attempts via visa regimes and other ‘smart’ border technologies to biopolitically order and pre-empt their movements never sufficed to either press them into ‘orderly’ flows or arrest them altogether. Quite the opposite was the case. They were the undesired side-effect of the Schengen visa regime, a ‘vast machine of illegalization’, that, according to Scheel (2017: 46, 39), is ultimately productive of ‘the very practices it is meant to forestall’. Though omitted in EUrope’s managerial discourse, biometric technologies are productive of intense disorder both in the lives of its targets and in terms of its desired outcomes as they fail to preclude the desire to migrate which finds expression in disobedient and unauthorised movements. It is thus illusory to believe that biopolitical control, even when working through the body, has erased the potential for evasion or resistance – in many cases it has been productive of precisely that. It is, therefore, equally illusory to believe that we live in a time when computers tracking positions suffice to govern migratory movements without making use of physical barriers and forms of violence usually associated with sovereign and disciplinary modalities of power. One should thus be cautious not to fall into the trap of believing what EUrope’s border managers proclaim to achieve without enquiring into how they go about achieving their ends. The ‘Dublin fingerprint’ stored in the Eurodac database, a biopolitical technology par excellence, is a case in point. It can be conceived with Polly Pallister-Wilkins (2016: 156) as one of those ‘sociotechnical devices’ utilised at the border, or as the border, meant to ‘capture, categorize and create particular sets of data about the populations they govern’. While ‘shaping the identity, moulding the subjectivity of its targets’ to the extent of Foucault’s disciplinary institutions may not be the fingerprint’s ability or aim, since the border regime ‘got no time for that’ (Walters, 2006: 198), it desperately requires the production of some disciplinary effects. The stored Dublin fingerprint is only useful if it modulates its subjects through the production of fear and (self-)discipline that ideally arrest their desire to leave the first country of entry and move onward. This modulation through ‘cyber-deportability’

168 Analytics of power (Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos, 2008: 176) is not achieved, however, simply by having turned the fingerprint and by extension the body into an identity document and ‘password’ (Deleuze, 1992: 5) – it can only be accomplished through biometric beatings in physical encounters between the border regime and its targets, and the lasting disciplinary trauma that they are meant to inflict. Knowledge and cautionary tales concerning the consequences of the Dublin fingerprint have widely circulated among migrant communities, often even prior to arrival in EUrope, so that fingerprinting is not a straightforward ritual, but one regularly encountering fierce opposition. As Samrawit, a young woman from Eritrea, told me: We had been in a boat accident, so when we left the boat, there were a lot of people, journalists, and the police. [. . .] Those who had medical problems were brought to one bus, the others to another bus. We travelled for 50 minutes, and we arrived at a big camp. We stayed in that camp for 2 days. We got some rest there. After that we said that we did not want to stay there any longer. They brought all of us to a big room and they locked us inside. We said that if we cannot leave, we will not eat anymore. They said, if you don’t give your fingerprints, you cannot leave. (2018, personal communication, 14 March) Samrawit’s first encounter with EUropean border enforcers, only days after surviving Libya as well as a shipwreck that caused about 200 fatalities in May 2017, was marked by her refusal to submit. In the end, she was tricked into leaving her fingerprints with the Italian authorities: They locked us in for 2 days. Then they asked us to come into another room, and that it was not about the fingerprint. They said they just wanted to check something, but they took our fingerprints. For many, these initial encounters with EUropean authorities are experiences of violence and deception in conditions of confinement. Being beaten, pressured, or tricked into yielding biometric information is not uncommon and these experiences leave lasting impressions, as it did for Alarm Phone member A. Abreham, who does not want to reveal his real name. His protest against the fingerprint in 2013 was quashed when the Italian authorities tasered him and fellow protestors into submission. We formed a community in protest of the fingerprint and were not allowed to leave Lampedusa. We protested for three months. It was difficult, some tried to commit suicide. In the end, they forced me and the others with electronic shocks to give them the fingerprints. Then they sent me to Sicily. (2017, personal communication, 5 March)

Analytics of power 169 Both Samrawit and A. Abreham did not remain in Italy – even the forced extraction of their fingerprints could not intimidate them sufficiently. Their biometric beatings and markings, however, followed them around, impacting their movements, livelihood, and modalities of struggle. A. Abreham, caught in Munich due to his racialised visibility, was humiliated at a police station, interrogated, stripped naked, and 300 Euros disappeared from his pockets. The fortunate solidarity of a translator prevented his immediate Dublin deportation. Samrawit lived rough on Italy’s streets, and once in Germany, in legal limbo and constant fear of being forcibly returned to Italy. Ultimately, even without the ‘means to check or to correct [their] data’ (Dijstelbloem, Meijer and Besters, 2011: 14), the Dublin fingerprint could not prevent them from moving on, settling elsewhere, and engaging in political campaigns to collectively resist deportation and spread advice to those still in transit through their activist group ‘Lampedusa in Hanau/ Germany’. The EUropean border regime cannot ‘tidy up’ the disorder it constantly creates through the deployment of enforcement strategies and forms of violence that are commonly associated with biopolitics. While its biometric technologies seek ‘to speak the “truth” of and for muted bodies’ (Browne, 2009: 135), and treat the body ‘as if it were an information storage device that simply has to be scanned’ (Dijstelbloem, Meijer and Besters, 2011: 12), these bodies are not mute passwords to be inserted into the computer in the quest towards (universal) modulation. Coming up against resistance in its plural expressions, the border regime’s attempts to scan its targets are all but straightforward and require the conscription of forms of enforcement that do not correspond with the ‘decorporealization of violence’ that Bargu (2014: 58) associates with biopower – the bodies of the protagonists of this book were repeatedly spatially contained, exposed to coercive extractions and the gazes of racial profilers. In Foucault-inspired scholarship, and in particular that which draws from notions of (neo-)liberal governmentality or biopower, Walters (2017: 64) notes, ‘insufficient attention is still paid to all the contexts and mechanisms in which people are subjected not to subtle or indirect forms of control but rather violent measures such as hunting, herding, branding and isolation’. Often relegating such violence to a sovereign-disciplinary past, or, to the contrary, generalising a (Agambenian) biopolitical state of surveillance to an ‘everywhere’, occurring ‘all the time’, and targeting ‘everyone’, the materialisation of contemporary powers that conduct and corporeally subjugate particular subjects in particular ways and spaces, often falls out of sight. In light of the recounted stories of migrant struggle, indeed very corporeal tales of resistance and power, proclaiming the disappearance or dissolution of sovereign and disciplinary technologies and the dawn of biopolitical population governance simply through ‘the computer’ would thus be certainly premature. But how can we conceptualise this system of power that continues to subdue, even in ‘biopolitical times’?

170 Analytics of power

Image 6.1 Eviction of the migrant activist occupation of Oranienplatz, Berlin/Germany, April 2014 Source: Oliver Feldhaus

Resisting what power with what resistance? The question ‘resisting what power with what resistance?’ has been raised by Lilja and Vinthagen (2014: 121–122), for whom there exists a corresponding form of resistance to each of Foucault’s three main modalities of power: Vis-à-vis repressive sovereign power, resistance is commonly ‘openly defiant and challenges through rebellions, disobedience and political revolutions’; resistance to normalising disciplinary power translates into ‘openly or covertly refusing to participate in self-disciplinary practice, which normalise subjects according to the norm’, such as through discursive interventions into what is the prevailing discourse; and resistance to the more elusive biopower calls into question biopolitical conduction and control, ‘engages with the main techniques of biopower through, for example, the creation of resistance cultures’, and cultivates ‘a different set of values, practices, and institutions’. Correlating the different forms of resistance traced in this book to particular modalities of power in this way may yield some interesting insights but allocating them along a sovereign-disciplinary-biopolitical continuum would feel forced. While this book has underlined certain characteristics

Analytics of power 171 of the different struggles by associating them with dissent, excess, and solidarity, the Non-Citizen’s confrontational resistance (Chapter 2), the attempts of those in arrested Greek transit to locate routes of escape (Chapter 3), or the encounters between activists and travellers at sea (Chapter 4) cannot be pressed into a singular shape, neither in terms of their resistance, nor in terms of the power they encountered. The multi-dimensionality of each struggle raises doubt as to whether identifying them predominantly with a form of power is desirable or even possible, at least when conceived as, and separated into, such ideal types, which, according to Lilja and Vinthagen (2014: 122) themselves, is ‘only possible on an analytical level’. Napuli, Jawad, Safinaz, and the others were rebellious in their own ways and dynamically so, under changing circumstances and confronted with agile configurations of power. Moving disobediently, hunger striking, discursively intervening, and loudly protesting, they wrestled with power’s divergent but interlocking forms that were often interlaced with and constitutive of one another – from biopolitical conduction, disciplinary modulation, and sovereign repression to necropolitical ending. How can we conceive of a system, structure, or shape that allows for these modalities to co-exist and to even mutually reinforce one another? Foucault’s notion of ‘dispositif’, for which I have used the more common term ‘regime’ in this book, is significant for investigations of EUrope’s border constellation as it allows us ‘to think about power in the perpetually dynamic social field’ (Bussolini, 2010: 90). Foucault (1980a: 194) understands (security) dispositifs as ensembles of practices, knowledges, and technologies that converge as epistemic communities, constituting systems of relations within ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’. In his investigations into madness, sexuality, and delinquency, Foucault (2010: 19, emphasis in original) repeatedly shows how the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth form an apparatus (dispositif) of knowledge-power that effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist and legitimately submits it to the division between true and false. Maybe most importantly, the dispositif’s ‘major function at a given historical moment [is] that of responding to an urgent need’ (1980a: 195, emphasis in original). Dispositifs form around specific issues that, regarded as problems, seem to require governmental remedy. Jeffrey Bussolini (2010: 91) has usefully characterised the dispositif as a ‘moving marker’ through which it would be possibly ‘to identify which knowledges have been called out and developed in terms of certain imperatives of power’. As a formation of power relations, or ‘a bricolage articulated by

172 Analytics of power an identifiable social collectivity’ (Rabinow, 2003: 52), it exhibits both a degree of systematicity due to ‘certain coordinates of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980a: 196), and a degree of volatility, due to intrinsic tensions. For Agamben (2009) and Deleuze (1991: 160–161), the concept of the dispositif holds a central place in Foucault’s writing, with the latter noting that it came about as a response to a crisis of thought: as if it had become necessary for him to redraw the map of social apparatuses [dispositifs], to find for them a new orientation in order to stop them from becoming locked into unbreakable lines of force which would impose definitive contours. Instead of forming an all-encompassing system or machine, the dispositif, as one of the ‘terminal forms power takes’ (Foucault, 1998: 92), entails ‘lines of sedimentation but also [. . .] lines of “breakage” and of “fracture”’ (Deleuze, 1991: 162). Although no form of resistance can ever lead to liberation from power, resistance is inscribed in relations of power, and thus in the dispositif: in power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if there were no possibility of resistance (of violent resistance, flight, deception, strategies capable of reversing the situation), there would be no power relations at all. (Foucault, 2000d: 292) As do all dispositifs, the EUropean border dispositif responds to an urgent need – it seeks to ‘[organise] circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad’ (Foucault, 2009: 18). But what, precisely, does it mean to maximise good, and minimise bad migratory circulation? As De Genova (2013c) and others have shown, the criminalisation of migration, thus the attempt to (ostensibly) repress it, is precisely productive of its subordinate inclusion as illegalised exploitable labour. So, what is often referred to as bad circulation – so-called unskilled, economic, or poverty migration – may not be unwanted after all. These wanted unwanted find themselves increasingly in the in-between spaces outlined by Bigo (2007: 16), in ‘zones of indetermination [and] conflation (of violence and meanings)’ where individuals find themselves who are ‘excluded from both the inside and outside, from both friendship and enmity, from both law and exception’. At the same time, not everybody is sought to be inserted into the deportable-exploitable workforce – some people are quite simply meant to be kept out, the unwanted. How does the EUropean border dispositif cater to these imperatives of subordinate inclusion and deterrence that seem to stand in tension with one another? Or, put differently, how does it enable ‘to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate’ (Foucault, 2010: 42)?

Analytics of power 173 The tension between liberal laisser-faire and security imperatives, the two dominant imperatives in EUrope’s border bricolage, is akin to what Foucault (2010: 282) calls the ‘essential incompatibility between the non-totalizable multiplicity of economic subjects of interest and the totalizing unity of the juridical sovereign’. For him (2010: 319), liberal economic thought poses a question to government: ‘What makes government necessary, and what ends must it pursue with regard to society in order to justify its own existence?’ In order for the economic subject to ‘instinctually’ follow economic pursuits, minimal governmental intervention is desired – ‘homo œconomicus is the person who must be let alone’ (2010: 270, emphasis in original). Granting (economic) freedoms constitutes a challenge to juridical-sovereign government and its disinclination to loosen its grip on the homo-juridicus, the person who cannot be let alone. For Foucault, this incompatibility finds partial resolution in the aforementioned art of government that governs (biopolitically) through freedoms but retains the (sovereign) privilege to potentially govern through force (Hindess, 2004). In the world of migration policy, this ostensible incompatibility is observable in the seemingly antagonistic imperatives to allow for the inclusion of exploitable migrant workers while repelling and excluding (the very same) migrants in the name of security or national homogeneity. According to Feldman (2012: 10), ‘neoliberals would have migrants to stay as long as their labor is needed while neo-nationalists would try to restrict those stays in any case on the ground that their presence jeopardizes the nation’. This dilemma, based on different ‘rationales of governance in the age of right versus right’, seems to find a resolution and compromise through the EUropean art of migration governance, by, for example, creating ‘circular’ and thus temporary, migration policies: ‘economic growth through cheap labor for the former, and the monitored and restricted presence of migrants for the latter’ (Feldman, 2012: 8, 10). Since, as Mezzadra (2011: 125) aptly puts it, ‘there is no capitalism without migration’, borders are not meant to be simply restricting or forbidding but are made ‘compatible with the circulation of workers’ (Geiger and Pécoud, 2010: 14). Migration is not sought to be ended but, in the name of migration management, guided ‘into a more orderly, predictable and manageable process, and [made] beneficial for all the stakeholders involved’ (2010: 2). Apart from the ‘highly-skilled’ and ‘qualified’, migrant subjects are not considered stakeholders in the quest to reap the benefits from synergies between seemingly antagonistic governmental rationales, the ‘win-win dynamic’, which Hansen and Jonsson (2011: 267) have detected between the ‘security-oriented fight against illegal migration, on the one side, and [the] neoliberal fight for growth and competitiveness, on the other’. Unlike Foucault’s economic man, the migrant worker is rarely entitled to be let alone but spoken for by neoliberals and neo-nationalists. And yet, the compromise between them and ‘their’ powers that both manage and repress, has not given rise to a fine-tuned machinery of migration management. As Fabian Georgi (2018) has argued, this coalition ‘that has underpinned the hegemonic compromise of an EU “migration management” since the late 1990s, has

174 Analytics of power increasingly frayed and partially broken down’, with neoliberal actors progressively becoming critical of the nationalist and often overtly racist stance on migration and turning towards a ‘meritocratic rhetoric of diversity and multiculturalism, stressing economic gains and other positive effects of migration’. The fragility and vulnerability of this neo-nationalist and neoliberal coalition is due, however, also to the fact that, through their unauthorised movements and struggles to stay, migrant subjects have become disruptive stakeholders in this dynamic. While some ‘migratory disorder’, often triggered through ostensibly order-producing instruments such as the visa regime, may be productively reabsorbed into the market as cheap labour, attempts to turn its subjects into both an exploitable workforce and deportable workers are often frustrated. The docility that both rationales require on the part of migrants to guarantee exploitation and subsequent removal is simply not given. As the history of migrant ‘guest’ workers has vividly shown, and as, for example, the low rate of Dublin returns shows today,1 sovereign orders to leave are often not followed, and struggles to stay recurrently coincide with struggles for adequate pay (Tsianos and Karakayalı, 2008). However, it is also in in light of these frustrations they generate that unruly subjects of migration find themselves exposed to what Balibar (2002: 38) once referred to as ‘negative bio-politics’, a modality of power that conscripts and weaves together different forms of violence, even those often believed to be of the past or, at least, a non-EUropean present.

Image 6.2 Greek-Macedonian border fence, Idomeni/Greece, December 2015 Source: L.M. for Moving Europe

Analytics of power 175

Power of life, power over life Responding also to a dissatisfaction with Foucault’s (1998: 137) emphasis on biopolitics’ exertion of ‘a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations’, notions such as necropolitics and thanatopolitics (Esposito, 2008) have found widespread currency in attempts to explain the persistence of forms of power that subjugate (some) ‘life to the power of death’ and create ‘death worlds’ (Mbembe, 2003: 39–40, emphasis in original). Mbembe (2003: 12) in particular has examined the conditions under which ‘the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death [is] exercised’. Considering the concept of biopolitics insufficient to explain a power that kills or that produces the ‘living dead’, those who, while alive, are kept ‘in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity’ (2003: 21, emphasis in original), he has importantly advanced the concept of necropolitics, thereby bringing deadly violence back into the equation, allowing to conceive of it not as a defect but as inherent in contemporary forms of hegemonic (mobility) governance. And yet, though it often tends to be forgotten, Foucault himself never dispenses with the existence of violence in biopolitical times. When elaborating on the transition from sovereign and disciplinary power to biopower, he notes that rather than regarding this new art of government as ‘the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of government’, it should be understood as ‘a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management’ (Foucault, 2009: 107–108). Even if these ‘regimes of power’ may have distinctive features, ‘the passage from one to the other did not come about (any more than did these powers themselves) without overlappings, interactions, and echoes’ (Foucault, 1998: 149). For Foucault (2004: 258), repressive violence has not been superseded but is, in fact, built into biopolitics through racism, the ‘mechanism that allows biopower to work’: racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. Exemplified by Nazism and its ‘eugenic ordering of society’ that created subdivisions – races – within a population, biopolitical racism is ‘a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain’ (Foucault, 2004: 255). Following Foucault (2004: 255), such racism not only fragments but ‘purifies’: ‘Its role is [. . .] to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: “The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more”’. Eliminating biopolitical threats within the population becomes a matter of survival.

176 Analytics of power Contrary to (liberal) claims, or fantasies, that border control or ‘migration management’ could be carried out in a supposedly tough but fair and humane fashion, the aforementioned ‘turbulence of migration’ (Papastergiadis, 2000), itself partly a consequence of such management, makes clear that the EUropean border regime’s neoliberal-neo-nationalist ‘dream of just-in-time and to-the-point migration is precisely a dream’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 175). Given that the divergent reality does not seem to alter the border dispositif’s feverish urgent need for orderly migration, attempts to make it somewhat operational have to draw from injurious and deadly powers, of which EUrope’s thousand-fold border deaths are a testament. In order to understand how such repressive power can work alongside a power that fosters and nurtures life, some conceptual fusions may be required that emphasise not one or the other, but their entanglement. In light of ‘the contradictory amalgamation of sovereignty and biopolitics as the distinguishing feature of contemporary power regimes’, Bargu (2014: 26) dismisses the suggestion that sovereign power has disappeared by given way to governmental biopower. Advancing the notion of ‘biosovereignty’, as mentioned previously, she conceptualises a regime that retains the sovereign-disciplinary power of repression as well as a power that speaks in the name of life, thus combining ‘the power of life with the power over life’ (Bargu, 2014: 84, emphases in original). Others have advanced similar notions, including the ‘sovereign machine of governmentality’, following Mezzadra and Neilson (2013: 167), or the ‘bionecro enforcement regime’, as advanced by Jill Williams (2015: 18) in the USMexican context, through which ‘migrant life is minimally managed under the persistent shadow of possible death’. Also conjoining the exception-making power of the sovereign with biopolitical rationality, but drawing on Agamben, VaughanWilliams (2009b: 747) portrays the biopolitical border as having become ‘generalised’, which would allow disentangling ‘an analysis of the activity of sovereign power from the territorial limits of the state and [relocate it] in the context of a bio-political field spanning domestic and international space’. Now, if one were to follow these insights into generalised biosovereign or bionecro constellations of power that are concerned with life but do not hesitate to also erase life, and if one were to accept Foucault’s suggestion that resistance is not autonomous from power but, instead, ‘coextensive with it and absolutely its contemporary’ (Foucault, 1990: 122), the question ‘resisting what power with what resistance?’ becomes even more complex to answer. Without ideal types of power, there are no ideal types of resistance. When modalities of power cluster to form ‘a chain or a system’ and become embodied in ‘social hegemonies’ (Foucault, 1998: 92–93) that in the case of the EUropean border regime turn into a ‘planetary machinery’, what possibilities for resistance remain at all? Are we facing a generalised power of exception, a global ‘zone of irreducible indistinction’, where without bounds and an incinerated inside/outside topology, the camp is everywhere and ‘we are all (virtually) homines sacri’ (Agamben cited in Vaughan-Williams,

Analytics of power 177 2009b: 735, 730, emphasis in original), exposed to bio-necro violence that reduces, in the name of life, everyone to bare life?

Racialised power, spatialised power While the migration projects of the Non-Citizen activists, the travellers stuck in Greece, or those crossing the sea were very diverse, they all paid dearly for coming up against the EUropean border regime. Their life-and-death struggles, and the disallowing of thousands of lives ‘to the point of death’ (Foucault, 1998: 138) in the Mediterranean and elsewhere every year, are vivid reminders that it would be a serious mistake to relegate repressive violence to a pre-biopolitical sovereign past or detach it from EUrope’s biopolitical present. The many recorded violent encounters between unauthorised travellers and border regime suggest that the necropolitical effects of a ‘generalised biopolitical border’ are indeed not ‘isolatable in space-time’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2009b: 744). Grotesque violence awaited in unlikely spaces and shaped even moments in ‘spaces of arrival’, commonly understood as safe and protected. And still, while not possible to isolate, the power that injures and kills does not present itself in the same manner across space and time, and certainly not just to anyone. Once it is accepted that biopolitics ‘must and does recuperate the death function’, one needs to turn to the ways in which ‘it does teach us’, according to Dillon (2005b: 44), ‘how to punish and who to kill’. My assertion is that while EUrope’s border regime requires the death function, it also requires the ‘disqualification of death from the political sphere’ (Bargu, 2014: 61), which is, after all, an elementary characteristic of biopolitics. It simply cannot ‘display itself in its murderous splendor’ (Foucault, 1998: 144). In Foucault’s conception, racism allows a biopolitical regime to exert deadly force – but on whom? Who is its racialised subject? For him (2003: 317), biopolitical racism ‘permits the screening of every individual within a given society’, so that potentially anyone considered deviant could fall prey to the power that lets die. For Dillon (2005b: 41), if biopolitics is to promote, protect and invest life, it must engage in a continuous assay of life [that] proceeds through the epistemically driven and continuously changing interrogation of the worth and eligibility of the living across a terrain of value that is constantly changing. In the process of assaying life, the ‘abnormals’, the biologically ‘inferior’, the physically, mentally, or sexually ‘aberrant’ are sifted out in order to prevent their deviancy to affect, or infect, the population as a whole. Foucault distinguishes between what he eclectically refers to as ‘new’, ‘neo’, ‘state’ or ‘internal’ racism and ‘traditional’ or ‘ethnic’ racism, as for him the function of biopolitical racism ‘is not so much the prejudice or defense of one group against another’, but, rather,

178 Analytics of power the making of divisions within ‘a single race into a superrace and a subrace’ (Foucault, 2004: 61). This split between ‘internal’ racism vis-à-vis ‘ethnic’ racism is unfortunate as it ignores their deep inter-relationalities and continuities. Based on this perception, would this mean that for Foucault, ‘ethnic’ racism is not the mechanism that allows biopower to function? For Amin (2010: 11), one should view the biopolitical ‘taming or punishing [of] the body judged to be errant’ as providing ‘an opening for past ethnic and racial hierarchies to return, wherever a politics of the social/communal is redefined as a politics of disciplining minorities and strangers’. Rather than simply a return of ‘ethnic’ racism into the realm of biopolitics, Weheliye (2014: 60) suggests instead that such racism has never disappeared in the first place, since ‘there exists no significant difference between ethnic and biological racism in the way Foucault imagines’. For him (2014: 60), all modern racism is biological, first, because it maintains the believed natural – often evolutionary – inferiority of the targeted subjects and, second, because racialization is instituted [. . .] in the realm of human physiology as the sociogenic selection of one specific group in the name of embodying all humanity. Critiquing Foucault’s treatment of ‘“ethnic racism” as a negative point of comparison for biopolitics’, Weheliye (2014: 56, 59) asks not to consign racism ‘to a theoretico-geographical no-Man’s-land’, but to allude to historical relationalities connecting, for example, the ‘internal’ racism of Nazi eugenics to forms of racism ‘perfected in colonialism, indigenous genocide, racialized indentured servitude, and racial slavery’. The racialised nature of EUrope’s biopolitical border control, effectively enforcing and reinforcing hierarchies of global mobility, raises doubt about Foucault’s binary account of race. Not only are hegemonic border regimes the expression of racialised segregationist desires, necro-power often came to the fore due to its subject’s (phenotypical) racialisation. The biopolitical and biometric screening of ‘every individual’ is not free from generalising or totalising racialisations that, predicated on (prior, historical) racialisations, assign degenerative potential to particular groups and turn them into stigmatic populations, seemingly endangering the livelihood of a bio-ethnically constructed population. Importantly, not every individual is exposed to screening in the same way, some individuals are screened more than others, not least as certain forms of screening are particularly designed for them, and since, in any case, as Joseph Pugliese (2011 : 7) has shown, ‘[n]ormative conceptualisations of race, gender, class, age and (dis)ability are already embedded within the very infrastructure of biometric technologies’. Given that the hierarchies of global mobility are also racialised hierarchies, the death function is built into biopolitical mobility control. There is, however, the simultaneous need to disqualify death from the EUropean political sphere,

Analytics of power 179 which presents the border regime with a problem. For a power for which ‘life is the supreme value’, thus caring for and guiding human circulation considered an indispensable aspect of a valuable life, the violence perpetrated against ‘bad circulation’ needs to be concealed, death must be designated to ‘the outer limit of politics’ (Bargu, 2014: 61). Disqualifying death does not mean erasing but eclipsing it. Such strategic eclipsing has been mentioned throughout the book – locating the responsibility for migrant death in the hands of smugglers or the migrants themselves and their supposed lack of ‘self-care’ or awareness about the risks they expose themselves to, lamenting the environmental conditions of the desert or sea and bad fate, reprimanding rogue individuals or national authorities for acting too carelessly and un-EUropeanly, all the while portraying humanitarian EUrope as trying to help but becoming overwhelmed by the magnitude of migrant waves. While eclipsing death is not merely a question of geography, space plays a pivotal role in the hiding of injurious or deadly violence. Many of the encounters of the book’s protagonists with gruesome violence took place in what is commonly understood as EUrope’s nominal political sphere, and still, they often seemed to be not ‘fully inside’, taking place in these indeterminate zones referred to earlier. Conditioned by trauma and deportability which weave into the present the dread of an already experienced violence and the dread of a violence to come, they were always with at least one foot out of the door. Caught in ‘heterotopias of deviation’, in spaces where ‘individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed’, they found themselves in in-between spaces, or the ‘other place’ within (Foucault, 1986a: 25). The Non-Citizen protest was sparked by the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) in the isolated migrant centre that drove Mohammad Rahsepar, according to fellow residents and friends, into committing suicide. For the migrant activists, leaving their spatial confinement was a step towards breaking their isolation, but only by becoming citizen would they really enter the ‘political sphere’, in which they, as sovereign citizens, could find protection from repressive sovereign violence. The murderous, physical, and sexual violence experienced by various members of Jaser’s family occurred predominantly in dubious borderzones, such as those between Turkey and Greece, in a refugee camp, or in police custody at the airport. The homeless transient population of Patras experienced humiliating degradation and torture mostly in the abandoned factory, in the woods there behind, or in Greek-Italian harbours, where hardly anyone was watching. Pointing to the out-of-sight-ness of these particularly brutal border encounters does not insinuate that injurious or deadly violence could not occur throughout EUropean space – it does – but generalising the violence that comes with diffusing EUropean borders to simply ‘everywhere’ and targeting ‘anyone’ does justice neither to the ways in which particular spaces become necropolitical zones more than others, nor to the fact that spatiality tells us something about the tensions and dilemmas inscribed in bio-necro regimes of population governance that are brought to the surface through

180 Analytics of power migrant resistances. What is required is attention to where border violence takes place because, as Barney Warf and Santa Arias (2009: 1, emphases in original) note, ‘where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen’. In the attempt to deter unwanted migrations and disqualify death from EUrope’s political sphere, death worlds have come into being, such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Saharan Desert, where ‘[i]n the name of life, the “mass grave” has become popularized, making death(s) nameless and innumerable, obscure and obscured’ (Murray, 2006: 192). It is there, and not in Schengenland, that thousands can lose their lives with little consequence, neither counted nor accounted for. But even between these two worlds, we can make out significant differences inscribed into their different spatialities. The Mediterranean border, though a zone of death, is also one of ambivalence, as previously shown. While, certainly, many of the lost lives remain unfound, with some washing up in Northern Africa and being recovered by individuals such as the fisherman Chamesddine Marzoug who has buried over 400 bodies at the cemetery of strangers in Tunisia (Al Jazeera, 2018),2 EUrope has consistently failed to fully disqualify such death from its doing and political turf. This failure is particularly visible when survivors and other witnesses give testimony to reveal the production of the Mediterranean’s deadly condition, or when bodies wash up on EUrope’s shores, as was the case when more than 360 Africans drowned a stone’s throw from Lampedusa in October 2013, triggering Italy’s Mare Nostrum military-humanitarian intervention. It is this ambivalence that turns the Mediterranean into a humanitarian border, unlike the death-scape of the Sahara where biopolitical care, even in its minimalist variation, is absent. According to UN estimates from October 2017, more people die there than in the Mediterranean (Miles and Nebehay, 2017). Though this has been claimed repeatedly, also by individuals I interviewed and who had survived this crossing, some of whom urged the Alarm Phone to also move into the space of the desert, a precise account of border fatalities is missing. While more and more activists and institutions count border fatalities in the Mediterranean, EUrope’s political sphere remains uncontaminated by these deaths in the desert, which hardly anyone seems willing to verify. With the reinforced outsourcing and externalising of EUrope’s border, the dilemma of border violence seems to find a spatial resolution which implies that the racialised necro-power of biopolitics constitutes at one and the same time a spatialised power. Despite the entanglement of the geographically and politically deterritorialising realities of the globalising EUropean border regime that render inside-outside binaries hollow, the seemingly interminable belief in the congruence between political and geographic spheres in the dominant (sovereign) imagination allows for the designation of necro-zones as being not of EUrope. Though wreaking havoc globally through its ‘permanent wounding of individuals’ (Davies, Isakjee and Dhesi, 2017: 1268), its violence rarely ‘returns home’, to what is conceived as the inside of a EUropean political sphere. In particular following the mass migrations of 2015, despite many precursors and historic trajectories, zones

Analytics of power 181 where disqualified lives are meant to move multiply and become ever-more fortified (Jakob and Schlindwein, 2018). Containment camps in African transit spaces exist already but it can be expected that they will become a common sight in the years to come. Where these lives are contained, tortured, or ended, is the principal concern of EUropean border practitioners, thus the reinforced externalisation strategies, seeking to disappear the atrocities, invisibilising them in the sea and desert, or in detention chambers of dictatorial allies. Ever-lengthier chains of culpability do not make harrowing forms of violence inexistent, but only shield the authors of violence under veils of unaccountability – thus the increasingly forceful attempts to push non-governmental witnesses out of these zones and silence migrant survivors through intimidation and confinement. Being mindful of how and where borders are moving, and the ways in which territory is used as ‘a political technology’ (Elden, 2010: 760), one may come closer to grasping that biopolitical sorting of (migratory) populations also-always means disciplinary ordering as well as necropolitical ending, all inscribed in the hierarchical promotion of the mobility of some, or, rather, the hierarchical promotion of some life, at the expense of other, racially abnormalised life. Those whose subjection to (historical) racialisation has produced them as largely outside of ‘the normative conditions of [. . .] recognizability’ (Butler, 2009: 4), find themselves disproportionally within spaces where their actual disappearance leaves hardly any trace and produces little consequence. Is this not the hallmark of hegemonic regimes – achieving global reach by extending and exporting its borders (as well as its goods, peoples, ideas) deeply into an elsewhere, and creating injurious and deadly zones along the way, without having their consequences, suffering on a massive scale, return back into (what it portrays as) its political sphere? Is this production of death of racialised others as well as its eclipsing not what makes the biopolitical border regime work, where ‘the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of groupdifferentiated vulnerabilities to premature death’ (Gilmore, 2007: 28), becomes spatially, and thus seemingly politically, dissociated from EUrope?

Confusing power, creating possibilities The existence of deadly borderzones such as the Mediterranean and the Sahara, just like the existence of spaces and technologies associated with disciplinary power, do not mean that the EUropean border regime is not thoroughly biopolitical. It suggests, rather, that in order to serve its urgent need for ordered and profitable circulation of populations, their governance requires the use of deadly violence that, while often considered antithetical to the biopolitical logic, is its constitutive other. In turn, that the dilemma of having to combine the seemingly incompatible biopolitical and necropolitical rationales finds resolution in these spaces, does not mean that the dilemma itself has been resolved – it has merely been displaced, the effects of which are always at risk of leaking out and becoming

182 Analytics of power exposed. And so, while we can conceive the EUropean border dispositif as a biosovereign or bio-necro enforcement regime, it does not imply, first, that it kills or injures randomly, anywhere or anyone, and, second, that it is without (internal) friction or vulnerability, especially when facing practices of resistance. Migrant struggles are the embodiment of fractures in the EUropean border regime – their very existence contests ‘the narrative of the progressive totalization of biopolitical government [that] tends to foreclose possibilities of resistance’ (Bargu, 2014: 26). Migrant analytics of power point to the global scope and the intricate and diffused ways in which EUrope polices migrations, but they inasmuch show that the existence of such ‘a system of dispersed police is not to suggest that some kind of world police state exists’ (Walters, 2015a: 14). Resistance was possible, often even in the most desperate of places, revealing, in its varying expressions, power’s ‘multiplicity of force relations’ (Foucault, 1998: 92) and the potential for their reconfiguration by ‘individuals and collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized’ (Foucault, 1982: 790). What emerged were the contours of a hegemonic construct, a dispositif requiring the utilisation of various modalities of power, sovereign, disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical, and their own economies of violence. Through migrant struggles, the different modalities of power were not only highlighted, but also confused. Meant to have their movements pre-emptively arrested, the book’s protagonists continued on unauthorised paths – the border regime was at least partially productive of their disorderly surging. Finding themselves in necropolitical spaces, some turned themselves into a humanitarian problem and appropriated life ‘as the object of counterpolitics’ (Bargu, 2014: 61). They placed themselves into EUrope’s dominant humanitarian frame by imitating its discourses on human rights. So, while for Prozorov (2007: 111, emphasis in original) ‘resistance to biopower must abandon its fixation of the figure of the sovereign and instead take the form of the refusal of care’, they practiced a form of resistance that precisely demanded biopolitical care not intended for them by turning themselves into subjects not of but at risk. It is due to these forms of resistance that spaces such as the Mediterranean become volatile, potentially at least ‘geographies of the multitude’ (Cobarrubias and Pickles, 2009: 52), where friction between varying rationales of governance relentlessly come to the fore, and into play. When some failed to receive a humanitarian response and were pushed-back at sea, they documented the violation of maritime law and refugee conventions, and, through transborder solidarities, scandalised their treatment by EUrope’s border managers. Arriving in EUrope, many of this book’s protagonists failed to resist biometric marking but defied its intended disciplinary purpose. Even with the border biometrically inside of them and projected onto their skin, they were not held up for long, consequently attracting corporeal punishment, confinement, and racialised policing in post-racial EUrope. Like Samrawit and A. Abreham, hundreds of thousands

Analytics of power 183 have settled where they wanted to settle, creating ‘facts on the ground’ that will spark subsequent migration chains, settlements of relatives, friends, community members. The computer noticing their expired stay does not suffice to rid EUrope of them. Enforcing what it has ordered is a continuously frustrating endeavour, hampered by refusals to comply – prolonged games of hide and seek. Biopolitics’ pastoral power depends on the ‘compulsory extraction of truth’ (Foucault, 2009: 185), but false confessions are common. What applies to the disciplinary shaping of migrant subjects applies also to the extraction of confessions: the border regime has no time and (administrative) resource for that, always failing to fully know and understand those it is meant to govern. ‘Logics of security and freedom confront one another’, Walters (2015a: 14) writes. The border regime’s mediation between at times disparate rationales is not a smoothly functioning and harmonious process. The compromise between those who seek to govern mobilities in the name of (economic) freedom and those who want to do so in the name of (national) security is fragile. Over-stayers, those merely temporarily invited or tolerated and meant to leave after their labour power has been depleted, frustrate the alliance between neoliberals and neo-nationalists. The latter insist on the deals of the bargain – the migrant’s time is up – but the former, facing the sheer force it takes to expel, and the scenes it creates, feel, though only at times, unease. While deportation amounts to ‘good circulation expelling bad circulation’, it hardly takes place under the sign of freedom, even less so when it is not done ‘voluntarily’ but requires handcuffs and agents who muffle screams by cutting off air supplies, placing those to be returned into ‘carpet karaoke’ positions (Stierl, 2012). When hunger strikes against deportability and the lack of rights and freedoms form in the public eye, governmental responses are equally troubled. Forging their lives ‘into a weapon as a specific modality of resistance’, migrant strikers prompt confusion among those attempting to respond to their ‘necroresistance’ and their ‘ultimate refusal of biosovereign domination’ (Bargu, 2014: 85). When the Non-Citizens were at the brink of death, the authorities deciding on their fate regarded them as both subjects in dire need of (biopolitical) care and as terrorists blackmailing the state deserving of (sovereign and disciplinary) punishment. Forms of migratory counter-conduct, to repeat a phrase used by Mezzadra (in Garelli and Tazzioli, 2013c: 310), embody, ‘localize and consolidate the possibility for ruptures’. The different migrant struggles, questioning the acceptability of conditions productive of exclusion, (forced) im/mobility, incarceration, and exposure to violence and abjectification, help locate relations of power assembling as a dispositif, a form of social hegemony that make domination with its ‘multiple subjugations’ (Foucault, 2004: 27) a reality. Revealing the lines of force of a regime of obscene brutality that deploys biosovereign or bio-necro scripts of violence, their counter-conduct confuses and shapes modalities of power and brings their imperatives into friction. Counteracting the eclipsing of violence that is indispensable in

184 Analytics of power the governance of human multiplicities in a world marked by radical inequality, they return violence considered outside of EUrope’s political sphere back home, forcing it back into its frame, showing that death and injury is of EUrope. Migrant struggles do, however, more than that. As constitutive forces, they create new political possibilities, as further explored in the concluding chapter. By disobediently surging into EUropean quarters, and struggling to stay, they make encounters possible that are not meant to take place, that the border regime seeks to thwart, demonstrating that, indeed, ‘[a]t the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom’ (Foucault, 1982: 790). It is in these enactments of freedom in movement – movements of freedom – that forbidden encounters and solidarities are made possible, and therewith collective future formations that are defined less by the powers that segregate.

Notes 1 For statistics on Dublin returns from Germany in 2017 see Pro Asyl (2018). In 2017, Germany sought to Dublin-return 64,267 individuals, out of whom 7,102 were returned to other EU member states. In the same period, 8,754 individuals were returned from other EU member states to Germany. 2 I met Chamesddine Marzoug at the Alarm Phone conference ‘Mediterranean Migration Movements’, 22–23 September 2017, Tunis/Tunisia. Alarm Phone volunteers have begun to assist him in maintaining the cemetery.

7

A speculative blueprint

‘My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism’. (Foucault, 2000a: 256)

In Franz Kafka’s enigmatic parable Before the Law, a man from the country seeks admittance to the law and encounters a gate, guarded by its keeper. Told that he could not pass, not yet, the man decides to wait. The doorkeeper, noticing his attempt to peer inside and catch a glimpse of what lies beyond the gate, suggests: If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him. (Kafka, 1971: 22) For months and years, the man from the country fails to overcome the doorkeeper, and, eventually, dies before the law, before the gate that was made exclusively for him. Prozorov (2007), inspired by what he conceives as the underlying ethos in Foucault’s writing – namely a longing for (an ‘anti-diagrammatic’) freedom – composes a new ending to Kafka’s parable and turns it not into the end of the man’s life, but, as a line of flight, into the beginning to an other life. In this altered ending, the man realises all that he could have been and could have become had ‘his silly fascination with the empty majesty of the law’ not gripped him: Having waited so long for access to the law, he has apparently forgotten why he so insistently sought to enter through that door in the first place. He gets up from this bench, picks up his tattered belongings, takes a final glimpse of the door and the doorkeeper, mutters a barely audible profanity and begins to walk away. The doorkeeper calls after him but his words, once so daunting,

186 A speculative blueprint now ring hollow and vanish into thin air. The man from the country walks away from the door of the law, slowly and cautiously at first but, as he leaves the law behind, his pace quickens. [. . .] His thoughts turn to all the things in life he has forgone because of his attachment to the law and all the things he might do now that the law no longer has any hold on him. The wind is rising, and, from afar, he can hear the door of the law slamming back and forth, no longer letting anyone in or keeping anyone out. Elated by the infinite expanse of possibilities now available to him, he breaks into a run, eager to return to a life he never had. It begins to look like a beautiful day. (Prozorov, 2007: 151–152) Turning away from the gate, the man from the country also turns away from his attachment to the law, his need for a sovereign verdict, from the allure of ‘power’ and his desire for biopolitical care. The man refuses the gaze and control of governmental authority, decides not to live a life seemingly imposed on him, imposed by others but also by himself. The man becomes indifferent to power. ‘Foucault’s key insight’, Prozorov (2007: 145) writes, ‘is that we should neither hate nor love power. Rather, our resistance to power must be conditioned by our fundamental indifference to it’. Becoming indifferent, he acknowledges, entails risks: a ‘state of exhausted destitution [. . .] awaits us when we twist loose’ (2007: 147). Walking away from borders, just like Prozorov’s man from the country did from the law, becomes increasingly arduous for those who find themselves before the many gates of EUrope, also those without imposing keepers. Though never able to fully twist loose from the different modalities of power that engulfed them, the people in transit and protest followed in this book still found themselves repeatedly in states of exhausting destitution. Struggling to move on or not to be displaced from where they were, they were exposed, time and again, to physical deterrents, governmental traps, mechanisms of subordinate inclusion, racist abuse, and violence in its many shapes. Many found themselves entangled in borderzones while also carrying the border within, their bodies turning into containers of knowledge that others harvest for biometric information. Maybe the gate was within the man from the country also all along, his fate ultimately determined by his failure, in Kafka, or his ability, in Prozorov, to abandon his fascination with the law, to master his desires and fears, and to walk away. Presumably, the idea of becoming indifferent to power and the law as a path to escape would appear alien to the migrant travellers and protestors followed in this book, a luxury that others may have. Instead of slipping away and leaving ‘the situation’ altogether, they were hardly able to become autonomously anonymous or anonymously autonomous. While Prozorov is right to allude to Foucault’s gestures to disappearance and face- and author-lessness as forms of resistance, we should also not forget Foucault’s (2000c: 167, emphasis in original) insistence on one’s entanglement in the situation:

A speculative blueprint 187 We cannot jump outside the situation, and there is no point where you are free from all power relations. But you can always change it. So what I’ve said does not mean that we are always trapped, but that we are always free – well, anyway, that there is always the possibility of changing. The protests and movements of the book’s protagonists were not necessarily expressions of a desire for anonymity or radical autonomy, did not form a contestation of governmental power or biopolitical care per se, or stem from ‘a fundamental anarchism [. . .] wholeheartedly resistant to any governmentalization’ (Foucault, 1997b: 73). They rarely sought to abandon law and power altogether, and wander into some state and space of anonymous freedom. Rather, they sought to walk into a somewhere where their lives were defined less by violence and harm, containment and racialised differentiation, by hunger and thirst, by loneliness, homelessness, and the continuous denial of their futures. Through their unauthorised movements, they constantly probed this Foucault-inspired question raised by Prozorov (2007: 5): ‘Given the present conditions of subjection, what are the possibilities of freedom available to us?’ Their desire, namely not ‘to remain in their situation’ (Rancière, 2010: 170), translated into manifold forms of struggle: overcoming and subverting border obstacles multiple times, surviving dangerous stretches of their journeys, seeking to become less perceptible in some moments and hyper-visible in others, taking on new identities or refusing ascribed ones, creating mobile commons and transitory solidarities to fend off everyday oppressions, utilising legal means and pathways, vocalising one’s human rights by exposing their violation, fostering discursive interventions, clashing with border and police authorities, striking and marching collectively, occupying and intruding into public spaces, engaging in hunger strikes and other practices of self-harm, contesting incarceration and conditions of deportability. In one way or another, they were constitutive of the situation they found themselves in. They were constitutive because their resistance enacted and expressed a freedom that could not be contained, that shaped, maybe in minor but still consequential ways, the situation itself. Their refusal to remain stuck in their situation translated into the incessant localising of lines of escape, in order to depart, physically, from spaces of predicament. Not remaining in their situation translated, however, also into dissensual acts that expressed a refusal to leave, and through which they even conquered spaces they were not meant to be in, demanding a level of care never intended for them. The desire not to remain in one’s situation turned, moreover, into novel alliances of solidarity, where the violence done to some was not resisted ‘merely’ by those most directly affected but also by others, who could not bear to live in a situation in which such suffering was not only possible but often enacted in their very name. The forms of resistance that I have conceived as dissent, excess, and solidarity in this book could never be contained under these broad rubrics alone. While they do point to different characteristics and emphases of

188 A speculative blueprint struggle, they necessitated one another. Dissensual confrontation, excessive movement, and the creation of solidarities are bound up with one another in migrant resistance, always located, to state it yet again, somewhere in between ‘“movement as politics” and “movement as motion”’ (Mitropoulos and Neilson, 2006). It would certainly be naïve or overly romantic to believe that forms of migrant resistance are prescriptive of a revolutionary struggle or path towards a better society and world to come. They are not. In their multiplicity, they cannot articulate a horizon of struggle, outlining, as a sort of migrant vanguard, precisely where to collectively turn. Seeing migration and its subjects as symbols onto which desires for political transformation are straightforwardly projected, or as a metaphor for a globalising world in which dislocation is believed to form a shared experience of homelessness, should be avoided, as Ahmed (1999: 333) has made clear: ‘[using] migration as metaphor, is to migrate from migration, such that it becomes an impossible metaphor that no longer refers to the dislocation from place, but dislocation as such’. Unauthorised forms of migration and their struggles in our contemporary world of borders are not to be romanticised, they often occur in the most precarious of spaces, they often occur due to precariousness. By following the stories and struggles of migrant travellers and activists, I hope to have avoided a ‘fetishism of figures’ (Ahmed, 2000: 4) and offered, instead, a rather accurate account of their complex experiences. And still, while the many painful struggles of migration portrayed in this book forbid their romantisation, they expressed an ‘impatience for liberty’ (Foucault, 2000b: 319) through disobedient movement, and often the demand ‘not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’ (Foucault, 1997b: 28, emphasis in original). Though they may not have been able, or willing, to twist fully loose from ‘any governmentalisation’, their acts of twisting were moments of freedom. Weheliye (2014: 14–15), whose notion of ‘speculative blueprint’ I borrowed for the title of this final chapter, briefly utilises it when trying to detect freedom from within suffering inflicted by histories of colonialism, wondering whether there exists freedom (not necessarily as a commonsensically positive category, but as a way to think what it makes possible) in this pain [. . .], and if said freedom might lead to other forms of emancipation, which can be imagined but not (yet) described. While certainly not prescriptive, when we follow these migrant enactments of freedom, these movements of freedom, a speculative blueprint towards a less violent and segregated world can be envisioned. Echoing Foucault (2009: 3), the intention of this chapter is not to create an ‘imperative discourse that consists in saying “strike against this and do so in this way”’, but, rather, to gesture to productive

A speculative blueprint 189 openings: ‘If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages’. Migrant resistances were at the heart of this book and by tracing them, key points for struggle and lines of force emerged – a fragmented assemblage of which is offered as the concluding part of this book.

Movements of freedom When I began my research, some findings of which eventually made it into this book, it was still 2011. Between then and now, summer 2018, we have witnessed how the radical reshaping of political landscapes was closely connected to unauthorised forms of movement and the re-drawing of borders. The Arab Uprisings marked a historic rupture in the EUropean-North African border alliance that had significantly curtailed transcontinental migration. With the Tunisian and Libyan regimes disintegrating, the ‘children of the revolution’ took to the sea. While lauding revolutionary and anti-authoritarian fervour from a distance, seeing it spill out and come closer, literally in the figure of the Harraga, EUrope scrambled to find new allies, new frontier guards. In the meantime, the continuous turmoil and war that engulfed many regions of North Africa and the Middle East, and in particular Syria, prompted an exodus that, at first, seemed rather contained within the region, only amounting to a ‘migration crisis’ in the EUropean conception when it spilled out further, in an unknown magnitude in 2015. Since that historic year, when mass migrations brought the EUropean border regime to its knees, we have seen EUropean counter-mobilisations – attempts on a mass scale to pre-empt, curtail, discipline, and deter unwanted others. The period between 2011 and 2018 can thus be characterised, in very broad strokes, as the swinging of ‘the dialectical pendulum’ (Bauder, 2018: 125), from a time of radical opening to a time of radical, though never total, closing. The migrant struggles traced in this book were deeply implicated in these trajectories of transformation. They walked in the footsteps of migrant mobilisations that had long preceded them, and they formed precursors to or partakers in the long summer of migration. What does it mean to conceive of them as movements of freedom? ‘[A]ll human beings possess the freedom of migration’, Harald Bauder (2018: 7) writes, ‘and they should be able to exercise this freedom’. In his argument, he (2018: 7) draws from Arendt, who once said that ‘[o]f all the specific liberties which may come into mind when we hear the word “freedom”, freedom of movement is historically the oldest and also the most elementary’. For her, this freedom ‘is also the indispensable precondition for action’, so that its denial, according to Bauder (2018: 7), encroaches ‘on a person’s ability to participate in transformative politics. In other words, freedom of movement is central to human liberation’. For him, borders limit or make impossible the exercise of this freedom, thereby denying people the ability to ‘create their own destiny’ (2018: 7). Bauder (2018:

190 A speculative blueprint 7) notes: ‘Since ancient times, restriction on the freedom of movement has been a condition of enslavement’. Based on the many instances of migrant resistance traced in this book and inspired by Bauder and Arendt’s take on the elementariness of the freedom of movement, I want to shift the emphasis ever so slightly, to perceive of unruly movements as enactments of freedom. Conceiving of movements of freedom is close to Prozorov’s (2007: 149, emphases in original) understanding of resistance as something that is ‘not protective but rather constitutive of freedom’, where, ‘in a strict sense, we should speak not of our desire for freedom, whose advent lies in the future but of the desire of our freedom to escape its captivity in the deficit of existence’. Given the bordered world in which the protagonists of this book found themselves entangled in, with their ability to migrate thoroughly limited, their contestations of these limits were the moments when freedom was exercised. When we re-call Mbembe’s (2017) words cited earlier, concerning the intertwined nature of struggles for freedom and ‘the aspiration to move unchained’, we could also understand them as conjoined in precarious movement, as struggles of freedom. It is in this way that we do not locate freedom merely in the realm of the future and abstraction, but in the present and in practice: ‘“liberty” is what must be exercised. [. . .] The guarantee of freedom is freedom’, writes Foucault (in Gordon, 1991: 47). Rather than being a precondition for action, it is in action that we see the exercise of this freedom, guaranteeing its existence. Though a radical practice that constantly upsets forces of restriction, ultimately, such conception of freedom seems to be defined rather negatively, maybe as an ‘unhappy positivism’ (Prozorov, 2007: 25), reminiscent of the phrase ‘those who do not move, do not notice their chains’ which has been attributed to Rosa Luxemburg. Detectable merely when in the attempt to twist loose the sound of rattling chains are reminders of its existence, freedom is expressed in action and movement, without which one may have never known that such freedom, but maybe also such constraint, had existed in the first place. Moving precariously, all the protagonists of this book felt their chains, not merely at ‘international’ borders but throughout their journeys as well as ‘at home’, from where some mobilised to not be removed. They challenged a regime of mobility control that, as biosovereign or bio-necro assemblages of power, was itself constitutive of ‘the situation’, generating an obstacle course of injurious and often deadly violence. Granted, there are other, maybe more hopeful conceptions of freedom but when we take on the perspective proposed in this book, namely to begin with migrant resistances and explore through them the modalities of power that converge to create and reinforce conditions of subjection, there can be no idea of freedom that is detached from the forms of violence that wrap themselves around any enactments of freedom, seeking to prevent and stifle their exercise. Based on this conception of freedom, I would add to Bauder’s observation: freedom of movement is central to human liberation and its expression. In this way, we are drawn to the present

A speculative blueprint 191 struggles that express freedom’s existence through its exercise in movement, as well as the counter-forces that seek to suppress it and thereby produce or reinforce conditions of subjection. So, rather than realising ‘that this freedom has been denied when people drown, die from starvation and exhaustion, are shot, or left to die in the desert during their attempts to exercise their freedom to migrate’ (Bauder, 2018: 8, emphasis added), we could say that they had exercised their freedom by migrating but their movements of freedom were confronted, countered, and choked.

Utopian yearning, utopian enactment Conceiving of unauthorised migration as enactments of freedom in conditions of subjection has nothing to do with the tiring and simplistic dualism between ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’ migration that still seem to dominate discussions in migration studies and also the wider public domain, although it should be a ‘commonsense statement that migration is very rarely completely “voluntary” or “free”’, as Mezzadra (2015: 122) notes. Rather, the different forms of migrant struggle portrayed in this book have drawn ‘attention to the interplay of subjection and subjectivation (or, to put it in a different way, of coercion and freedom)’ that take place on the ‘battlefield’ of migration (Mezzadra, 2015: 122, emphasis in original). When we understand freedom in and through its enactment, we focus on the moment, the present situation within and against which one struggles. Is it possible to distil from migrant resistances a future-oriented vision or a way of envisioning, in a rather hopeful way, an alternative political horizon? Though ‘[o]nce they were a staple in forward-looking scholarship, activism, and politics, and inspired practitioners to translate these utopias into practice’, Bauder (2018: 10) suggests that ‘[u]topian imaginaries have become rare in scholarly and public debate’. Referring to utopian thinking as a way to problematise contemporary society and at the same time envision ‘an alternative ideal-type world’, he (2018: 56, 59) mobilises the notions of ‘contingent possibility’ and ‘possibilia’, the former referring to everyday struggles constitutive of the here and now, and the latter referring ‘to a world that arises under not-yet-existing conditions and the not-yet-discovered ways of imagining this world’. Great social transformations and revolutions have historically not simply emerged from the drawing board, but through both everyday struggles and radical imagination. What this book has sought to do by following migrant struggles is closely tied to Bauder’s argument, though it wants to conjoin these two dimensions, contingent possibility and possibilia, a bit more tightly. In slightly shifting his argument, we can see enactments of contingent possibilities within the horizon of possibilia – prefigurative transformations in the everyday that are constitutive of a world that will look quite different to the one we inhabit at the moment. The long summer of migration serves as a prime instance of a collective ‘utopian yearning’ (Akomfrah, 2016) being put into practice. Nobody, neither governments, international migration ‘managers’, nor

192 A speculative blueprint scholars of migration had anticipated the long summer and many still fail to understand its significance, commonly unable or unwilling to question its dominant portrayal as an unprecedented ‘migration crisis’ and ‘humanitarian emergency’. A different account seems in order. When over 2015 and early 2016 more than one million people crossed the Aegean Sea without authorisation, they temporarily altered the conditions of subjection that had characterised the Aegean border before, moving considerably closer to a reality of de facto free movement. Unlike before, journeys were often organised in the open. In light of the high demand, the financial costs of crossings decreased. Queues of travellers lined up on Turkish shores along various points of departure. Routes chosen became shorter and more straightforward, often leading to Lesvos Island. Though certainly not all, but very many boats arrived in broad daylight, unthinkable before. Often whole caravans proceeded to the islands, at times appearing closer to festive processions than illegalised movements. With the Alarm Phone and other (migrant) activists supporting precarious passengers on thousands of boats, novel forms of solidarity emerged in the moment of border crossing. With activists as well as the media of the world watching, direct assaults on migrant boats decreased. Who welcomed them on EUrope’s shores were not police forces but Greek locals and international supporters. With journeys becoming overall safer, the composition of the groups of travellers changed in terms of age and gender. Unlike in the Central or Western Mediterranean regions, women and children now regularly constituted the majority on the boats. We saw the sick and elderly carried or being lifted on wheelchairs into and out of rubber boats. The proportional decrease in migrant death in the Aegean in 2015 from the year prior was remarkable: though about twice as many people did not survive the journey, more than twenty times as many arrived relatively safely in Greece. Certainly, calling this moment one of de facto free movement can be considered misleading – it clearly was not really free. The hundreds of thousands took to the sea as the northern Greek-Turkish land border was heavily barricaded. Scenes of pregnant women lying dehydrated in the sun, of the sick and elderly collapsing at Greek beaches, and children suffering from hypothermia were common. And even if the death rate declined dramatically, many still did drown. About 800 people died in the Aegean Sea in 2015, many of whom were children and women, and their loss forbids romanticised accounts of the mass crossings. At the height of the long summer, something did shift, however. A collective energy produced by people on the move carried many along who would not have made it otherwise. Given their sheer number, they could not be contained on the islands, not be imprisoned and detained, but had to be allowed to move on to mainland Greece. This transformation of the experience of unauthorised migration continued with the March of Hope through the Balkans. While facing brutal police and military forces, the collective marches overwhelmed them and opened corridors that subsequently became semi-official or even formalised (Speer, 2017).

A speculative blueprint 193

Image 7.1 Protest along the Balkan Route, Winter 2015 Source: Moving Europe

These disobedient movements put not only smugglers out of work, especially in Patras, Igoumenitsa, and along the Balkan Route, but also the Dublin Regulation, one of the main pillars of the EUropean border regime. Until then unwaveringly supported by some of its central architects, especially Germany, it simply ceased to be respected, neither by the travellers themselves, nor by the now ‘transitory’ states. For the newly arrived as well as those who had previously spent months or years stuck in Greece, it now often took merely a few weeks to reach their desired destinations. Despite the overall hyper-perceptibility of the march through the Balkans, its large numbers also allowed some to become rather invisible within, with many slipping through borders without ever being registered. The Aegean crossings and the March of Hope were underwritten by a rebellious utopian yearning, demonstrating the fallibility of border regimes and their vulnerability to collective action. When Safinaz, together with hundreds of thousands of others embarked, literally, on paths towards uncertain worlds, something historic was in the making – the protagonists of migration were constitutive of ‘the situation’ to an extent greater than ever before. In these mass enactments of freedom, we saw the peak of migrant ‘strategies capable of reversing the situation’ (Foucault, 2000d: 292). With hundreds of thousands creating a safer and quicker migration experience for themselves and those following them, able to remove collectively the restrictions

194 A speculative blueprint in their paths, we saw, though merely temporarily, utopian enactments in the here and now. Escaping predicament, often repeatedly, overcoming the sea, and crossing without authorisation several nation-state borders in order to ‘make home’ in an unfamiliar place – they extended, again and again, political possibilities in movement. Today, in summer 2018, it is clear that the pendulum has swung back, the summer of migration is long over. The introduction of ever-more violent restrictions has led to a decrease in sea-crossings and the simultaneous increase in fatalities in the Mediterranean. While I write these lines, in June 2018, shipwrecks occurred in all three Mediterranean regions over the first weekend of the month, with over 100 fatalities off the coast of Tunisia, eight deaths off Morocco, and nine deaths off Turkey – in the latter two emergency situations, the Alarm Phone was directly involved. Even if nobody had anticipated the mass crossings of 2015, it now seems unlikely that movements on such scale can be expected soon – the border regime has learned from its defeat and is eager to reinforce itself rapidly. And yet, the mass arrivals of 2015 and early 2016 have cultivated something beyond the act and moment of transgression, something that has transformed EUrope from the ground up and that will not be erased. Over these two years, two and a half million people have claimed asylum in EUrope – between 2013 and the end of 2017, more than four million in total (Eurostat, 2018). In the years prior to 2013, the figure had not exceeded 300,000 claims per year. Even if a repetition on such high levels seems unlikely in the near future, it is through their presence, many of whom will succeed in their struggle to remain, that facts on the ground were created that will not be expunged, that will alter EUrope no matter what. As histories of (‘guest’ worker) migration tell us, the vast majority of newcomers will struggle, stay, and generate future chains of migration that enable relatives, friends, and community members to follow, with or without EUrope’s permission. The uncertain world they were set to reach in their migration projects is in the process of being re-constructed through their everyday struggles for presence, which, in turn, will make the world a bit less uncertain for those still seeking to come. While I am sceptical of conceiving unauthorised forms of migration across (‘international’) borders as ‘social nonmovements’ as proposed by Bayat (2010: 15), simply as there often is nothing ‘everyday’ or ‘non-moving’ about these life-anddeath struggles, the presence of newcomers throughout EUrope following their crossing can be productively understood through his notion of ‘encroachment’: They spread, expand, and grow in the cities of the global North; they settle, find jobs, acquire homes, form families, and struggle to get legal protection. They build communities, church or mosque groups, cultural collectives, and visibly flood the public spaces. As they feel safe and secure, they assert their physical, social and cultural presence in the host societies. Settling in increasingly greater numbers in EUrope, the assertion of their presence, and not merely after they feel ‘safe and secure’, provincialises EUrope

A speculative blueprint 195 (Chakrabarty, 2000). These migrant struggles to stay and make life, after struggling to move and survive, embody contingent possibility and inject futures with possibilia, a EUrope that is transformed through subaltern cosmopolitan movements. Their arrival and settlement are certainly not a blueprint prescriptive of a better world to come, but they are constitutive forces of a different world to come. New conflicts will most certainly arise – they already do – and whether we will find ourselves in a less violent world in the years to come is up to question, not least as the anti-migrant backlash is real and vicious in the current political moment. [W]hite European elites express profound anxiety about the ‘invasion of foreigners’ – Africans, Asians, and in particular Muslims – who they see as having overwhelmed Europe’s social habitat, distorting the European way of life by their physical presence and cultural modes – their hijab, mosques and minarets. Truth is, rhetoric notwithstanding, the encroachment is real and is likely to continue. (Bayat, 2010: 15–16) In this political climate in which EUrope is being provincialised but in which it also provincialises itself through racialised violence and othering, emphasising that encroachment and transformation are underway may engender hope but, at the same time, feel insufficient to locate a future horizon to strive toward. Provoked by such encroachment through which ‘something assumed to be fixed, coherent, and stable is placed in question, and subjected to doubt and uncertainty’ (Goldberg and Solomos, 2002: 5–6), the danger of an increasingly violent backlash is already palpable. The conditions of subjection for the newly arrived within EUrope and those still seeking to come, are hardening. Those who reject this conjuncture of closure seem to be in the defensive, at times scrambling to follow the dizzying pace at which long-held rights are undermined, thresholds and red lines overstepped, and (human rights) standards violated. If ‘everything is dangerous’, as Foucault puts it, political apathy seems the worst of possible positions. Alternative political horizons are required that political resistances can strive toward, and for which movements of freedom can ignite the spark.

Open borders, no borders? Two visions that see the freedom of movement as key for a different and a more just world to come, are the open border and no border scenarios, many of whose proponents have appeared already in the preceding chapters. Unlike the call for no borders, the call for open borders has ‘proponents from across the political and philosophical spectrum’ (Bauder, 2018: 49). It has been formulated from a range of at times conflicting perspectives, but commonly it envisions no, or few, restrictions on cross-border migration. Border controls would still exist, in order

196 A speculative blueprint to sift out potential harm. For some, including Joseph Carens (2015, 1987), the call for open borders is underpinned by a moral argument, with borders violating universal principles of equality by subjecting human beings to differential treatment, simply based on birth-right privileges, or the lack thereof. For him, save for instances where restrictions on movement can be justified, for example to keep out terrorists or invading armies, borders should normally be open. For others, arguing from what Bauder (2018: 42–44) refers to as ‘market-economy’ and ‘politicaleconomy’ positions, borders should be open since they constitute disruptions to the ‘labor market and therefore cause economic inefficiencies’, or, to the contrary, since they are precisely integral to the contemporary capitalist system, in that they ‘have been tools of labor control and exploitation’, leading to a segmentation of ‘labor by locking vulnerable and exploitable workers into countries with low wage and labor standards, or by deskilling and criminalizing a considerable portion of the workers who are able to cross the border’. Pécoud and de Guchteneire offer an open border scenario by calling for a genuine right to mobility. Given that according to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights every human being ‘has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State’ as well as ‘the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country’ (UN, 1948), an individual who is allowed to ‘leave his country but not accepted by any other country [sees] his right to emigration violated’ (Pécoud and de Guchteneire, 2006: 75). For them (2006: 75–76), a real right to mobility would not simply add ‘one more right to a long list of rights; rather it is about fostering respect for existing human rights’. A generalised right to mobility and the simultaneous opening of borders would entail a variety of benefits: the process of migration would become safer, the need for smugglers would disappear, and the possibility of moving more easily forth and back between spaces would lead to more fluid, temporary, and circulatory migration dynamics. Increased migration from the global south would operate as a way of redistribution through rising income and remittances. With the disappearance of the illegal status, the risk of ‘social dumping’ and unfair competition in relation to already present workers would diminish. Moreover, since nobody would still be required to evade border control and travel without authorisation, the opening of borders would offer more rather than less control over mobile populations. The call for no borders, though at times overlapping with some of the arguments made for open borders, is underpinned by an alternative vision, usually articulated from feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, and anti-imperial perspectives. For Mitropoulos (2010), and in contrast to an open border politics that does not do away with the state or with its subjection of people to categorisation, a no border politics ‘wants to erase the border, both in an epistemological sense and in a political sense’. No borders, for her (2010), forms ‘a very corrosive and practical way of thinking about politics, without thinking like a state’. For Anderson, Sharma, and Wright (2009: 11), borders are central ‘to capitalist social relations’, so that a no

A speculative blueprint 197 borders position would necessarily have to distinguish ‘itself from calls for open borders made by the Right, calls that centre on the availability of persons made mobile largely because of prior instances of dispossession and displacement’. They (2009: 12, emphasis in original) argue that a no borders approach ‘is part of a revolutionary change’ that would ‘[call] into question the legitimacy of the global system of national states itself and the related global system of capitalism’. As a practical political project, that ‘is being carried out daily’, they (2009: 12) view no borders as certainly less ‘utopian’ than, as De Genova et al. (2017: 145) hold, the ‘absurd fantasy of territorially-defined so-called “national” states – the fantasy of total control over presumably separate and discrete human populations and our mobility’. Open border and no border visions of a world with fewer, or no, restrictions on human movement differ considerably on where to locate the driving forces of political transformation. The call to open but not to eradicate borders often addresses the realm of (state) policy by proposing the open borders scenario as a ‘“win-win-win” solution that would contemporaneously favor migrants, states, and the global economy’ (Heller, Pezzani and Stierl, 2019). The call for no borders, to the contrary, insists that ‘progressive’ socio-political transformations do not emanate from the top, but are struggled for from the bottom-up, through migrant-activist resistance and social movements. For its proponents, the eradication of borders is not meant to benefit all, especially not the many (neo-nationalist and neoliberal) profiteers of a segregated world, whose ‘border imperialism’ has caused the ‘mass displacement of impoverished and colonized communities resulting from asymmetrical relations of global power, and the simultaneous securitization of the border against those migrants whom capitalism and empire have displaced’ (Walia, 2012: 5). The migrant resistances traced in this book and conceived as movements of freedom neither erased nor completely undid borders, whatever that would mean or entail. Though overcoming several (state) borders by temporarily opening or subverting them, refusing to be crossed by them or injured by their violent enforcement, it is uncertain whether we can, or should, view them as a no border or open border politics in action. What their struggles showed was that the battlefield of migration has long left the confines of the reductively conceived border and has spread out through society and space. Their livelihood was infringed in a myriad of ways and spaces, and by a myriad of actors. They were entangled in proliferating borders that often did not appear as sovereign gates with sovereign keepers but that criss-crossed the social body, and their bodies, along hierarchical lines of race, class, gender, and legal status. Their multifaceted resistance raises the question whether the no border equation ‘to refuse the border is also to refuse state sovereignty’ (King, 2016: 25) does hold. De-centering the gaze from or fixation on the state which are at times detectable in both open and no border scenarios, does not mean losing it from sight. Rather,

198 A speculative blueprint beginning with lived realities of struggle in conditions of subjection means taking into account also the multiple social boundaries that at times emerge in concert with, at times in tension with, state and EUropean boundaries. The importance to not narrowly view the border ‘as an object to be eliminated rather than as a bundle of social relations that involve the active subjectivity of border crossers as much as the interdictory efforts of border police and other control agencies’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 267), cannot be overestimated. What would it mean to open or eradicate the border if it was not reductively defined as a sovereign object but as ‘a complex system of limitation, differentiation, hierarchisation, and the differential inclusion of migrant groups’ (Bojadžijev and Karakayalı, 2007: 210)? When ‘both borders and the threshold immanent to justice [are] mobile, permeable, and discontinuous’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 269), what visions of a less violent and segregationist world tied to calls for the erasure or opening of borders can still arise?

Lines of flight, lines of fight The notion speculative blueprint seems able to express what feels characteristic of movements of freedom: stepping into uncertainty but not without a map or an idea of what may await, contingent possibility constitutive of possibilia. Listening to individuals and their implication in a plurality of struggles with and against borders has indeed revealed the mobility and discontinuity of both forces of coercion and those of freedom, subjection and subjectivation. The deep entanglement of these forces prohibits any ascription of purity, neither on the side of constraint, nor on the side of freedom. Escaping this entanglement was never a precondition for resistance. Rather, resistance in unauthorised migration was always-already conditioned by, and constitutive of, forces of constraint, and vice versa. While placing the different modalities of struggle under the heading of resistance may evoke some critique, it has irrevocably placed them in the realm of politics, a precondition to fully recognise their transformative potential. Resistance as method was the experimental gaze employed, a practice of investigation that did not need an a-priori and reductive definition of resistance but allowed for migrant mobilisations to probe and stretch what is commonly believed to constitute acts of resistance. Perceiving them as political moments and practices in the first place and in their own right sought to create a sensibility for the significance of their (everyday) contestations over mobility. As catalysts they set transformative processes into motion, as analytics they revealed some of the modalities of power underpinning border regimes, and as diagnostics they shed light on the present condition of EUrope. Stretching our imaginary of resistance and recognising it in migrant struggles allows to conceive of the ‘infinite range of possibilities of freedom in the here and now’ (Prozorov, 2007: 149). Beginning with migrant enactments of freedom means being attentive to the ‘alternative border imaginary’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2009a: 34) they precipitate.

A speculative blueprint 199 Only when we depart from the border imagined as a simple sovereign line can we understand, in a nuanced way, how and where struggles over mobility play out. The border has long left the edge of sovereign space and its diffusion has been the result of the extension of control through expanding (nation-state/EUropean) border regimes as well as the displacements and (sovereign) unbundling that are part and parcel of neoliberal globalisation – dynamics that can stand in tension with but also reinforce one another. The transformation of the border has, however, also resulted from the manifold struggles for movement, whose continuous contestations from below reconfigure borders and demonstrate their volatility. It seems as if any envisioning of a future world that is underpinned by a desire for a less segregationist and unequal make-up will need to grapple with the reconfiguration of borders, taking into account both their sovereign and neoliberal capitalist inscriptions as well as the myriad ways in which they can be, and are, transformed from below. Beginning with migrant struggles means paying attention to the ways in which borders materialise as socio-political relations that map onto, and thereby reinforce class-based, gendered, and racialised differentiations, hierarchies, and segregations. Though not targeting simply anyone or coming about in a random fashion, borders can still come into existence ‘everywhere’ – ‘wherever selective controls are to be found’ (Balibar, 2002: 84). Their diffusion does not alter the fact that the border remains a thoroughly ‘nondemocratic’ institution (Balibar, 2004: 109) that allows control over movements and their subjects, while it is rarely subjected to control itself. In particular those who travel without authorisation and who find themselves outside of formal citizenship are exposed to such nondemocratic, or even, dictatorial condition of the border. The ways in which the protagonists of this book were exposed to its violence throughout and beyond EUropean space, the perpetrators of which remained largely unaccountable, showed that the border’s dictatorial condition has manifested itself through society and space, mostly for those racialised as other. Finding themselves within borders and marked by borders within, they were hardly able to fully escape their reach. With the current backlash of the border regime in a climate of right-wing populism and closure, the dictatorial border is multiplying rapidly, thereby cutting up and diminishing existing democratic spaces. EUrope’s lawfare on and the criminalisation of (migrant) activists, for example in the hotspot-detention centres on Greek islands, along the Balkan Route, or in the Mediterranean show clearly that practices of resistance in borderzones are exposed to dictatorial re-takings. It is in these conditions of subjection and danger that Foucault’s call for a hyperand pessimistic activism appears timely – there really is always something to do. Even if we agree that EUrope’s transformation through migrant encroachment will not be reversible, there can be no standing idly by while forces of closure seek to inflict as much suffering as possible on racialised others. One way of ‘doing something’ was outlined by Balibar when he called for the democratisation of the border. For him (2004: 108), the task would be to put it ‘at the service of men

200 A speculative blueprint

Image 7.2 Alarm Phone truck at We’ll Come United Parade in Berlin/Germany, September 2017 Source: Mazlum Demir

and submit it to their collective control, make it an object of their “sovereignty”, rather than allowing it to subject them to powers over which they have no control’. While the borderisation of EUrope entails the diffusion of the dictatorial condition, at the same time, forms and targets of resistance also multiply. When migrant resistances are conceived as the pointers of struggle Foucault spoke about, continuously revealing constrictions and blockages but also ways to circumvent or confront them, following them opens up a field of possible engagement. They lay bare the pressure points and points of friction of border regimes, and gesture to spaces in dire need of democratisation. In fact, following Balibar (1996), a certain gratitude is in order, for the struggles of the non-citizens and sans papiers, ‘with their resistance and their imagination, [breathe] life back into democracy’. Throughout society and space migration resistances are being fought out – the battlefield does not reside anymore, if it ever has, at the supposedly outer limits of the EUropean community, but throughout, and way beyond of what is commonly conceived as its nominal territory. Democratising borders thus means resisting their dictatorial manifestations wherever they appear, in our neighbourhood, our places of work, our schools, hospitals, and universities, but also further away, wherever EUrope’s borders create and reinforce conditions of injustice. In order to collectively control (the controllers of) borders means creating coalitions of struggle that become as transversal and diffuse as hegemonic border regimes, if not more so, in order to work towards defending and enlarging the democratic spaces that are under attack. Some examples were offered in this book: the Non-Citizens who fought for

A speculative blueprint 201 citizenship rights and social participation, created radical spaces of occupation and rallied a large solidarity movement behind them, though not without friction; the travellers in Greek transit who fostered mobile commons and underground knowledge economies to shield them from the violent excesses of border enforcement, some of whom returned to their place of arrival to support those following into their footsteps; the Boats4People and Alarm Phone collectives who supported unauthorised movements while counter-surveiling a desperately undemocratic space and working towards a Mediterranean region of encounter, not abandonment. All over EUrope, especially during or after the long summer of migration, novel initiatives and welcoming structures have formed, from autonomist squats such as Hotel City Plaza in Athens to labour union and church spaces where those exposed to deportability could seek shelter and asylum. In particular on the scale of the city, often under the heading of solidarity or sanctuary cities, novel coalitions have emerged, also those that see ‘migrant issues’ not as a stand-alone issue but as the point of connection for a range of social questions – affordable housing for all, medical care for all, free education for all (Bagelman, 2016; Bauder, 2017). Also beyond EUrope, novel coalitions come into being. Across the Mediterranean space, networks are emergent that seek to trace and counter the strengthening of EUropean-North African border alliances. Further south, for example in the ‘transit’ spaces of Niger and Mali, political campaigns have taken root to oppose the effects of EUrope’s externalising border, including the Alarm Phone Sahara project (Alarm Phone, 2017a). Many of these movements are characterised by an ability to articulate in practice and at once, present and future temporalities of struggle. Mezzadra (in Garelli and Tazzioli, 2013c: 318) has alluded to such radical simultaneity through his idea of a ‘split temporality’ in the fight against detention centres: It is a split temporality in the sense that you are yourself split in the moment in which you negotiate with the municipality in the city where you are living about the conditions of detention in the centre and in the very same moment you are struggling for the abolition of detention. Instead of a double temporality, where first reform of detention is the strategic aim, followed by its abolition afterwards, a struggle characterised by a split temporality formulates demands for reform and closure in radical simultaneity. This posture can be thought beyond the specific case of anti-detention work, as a form of radical pragmatism or ‘principled opportunism’ (Knox, 2009: 433) that gradually transforms (or reforms) conditions of subjection while never doubting the strategic aim inscribed into a counter-hegemonic struggle, a world without violent segregation and radical inequality. The concept of ‘subaltern cosmopolitan legality’ coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito (2005: 15) speaks to that. They (2005: 15) conceive legal pathways not as the only or ultimate remedy, as it so often is in migrant rights advocacy, but as one strategy among many others,

202 A speculative blueprint also those ‘illegal (as well as non-legal) strategies through which transnational and local movements advance their causes’. Besides the reform of conditions in detention, struggles for formal citizenship rights, the adherence to international legal frameworks at EUrope’s (maritime) borders, transparency for expenditures on borders camouflaged as development aid, or increased accountability of border enforcers such as Frontex can be understood in this way. Coalitions of struggle are built through a form of (migratory) solidarity that somehow stiches together movements thought as motion and politics. They are necessarily composed of different subjectivities and positionalities where a common political ideology and agenda cannot be assumed to simply exist from the beginning. [T]he problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a ‘we’ in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a ‘we’ possible, by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the ‘we’ must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result – and the necessarily temporary result – of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it. (Foucault, 1991: 395) Rather than expecting that a collective ‘we’ is present already or that a particular vision of the future is held in common, commonalities are built in complex exchanges where not all differences and disjunctures can be erased, not least due to the differential distribution of vulnerability, racialised violence, and global injustice. A ‘we’ can only cautiously be formed in migration struggles that operate at the limits of commonality and intelligibility. The possibility for collective future formations cannot be assumed or guaranteed but needs to be explored in encounters in the ‘unliveable places’ of the border, where, ‘in order to meet, one most often needs interpreters, mediators’ (Balibar, 2002: 85). With the diffusion of borders that weave their dictatorial conditions throughout society, turning more and more spaces into unliveable ones, these encounters that require translation and mediation constitute ‘a form of political labor that produces a subject in transit’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 289, emphasis in original), or, rather, collectivities in transit. With the question of the border having become the question of the social itself, there simply exist no side-lines anymore. Migrant resistances, long believed to be marginal and barely political, are woven into the very fabric of contemporary battles over justice and equality, not least as they reveal the violence of borders that create or reinforce systems and structures of devastating inequality, connected to economic deprivation, environmental degradation, wars and conflicts. Understood as such, and as nodal points for struggles over global justice, as lines of flight and lines of fight, movements of freedom can thus be what ignites the emergence of collective struggles that re-claim the democratic spaces that are currently shrinking all around our bordered world.

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Index

Note: Illustrations are indicated by page numbers in italic. Abbott, Tony 140 abjection 17, 93, 95, 183 acts of citizenship 28 acts of wronging 40–54 Aegean Sea 66–67, 69, 93–94, 105, 107, 109–112, 117–118, 192; see also Mediterranean Afghanistan 50, 68–69, 71, 80–82, 85, 87, 117 Agamben, Giorgio 44, 169, 172, 176 Ahmed, Moawia 74 Ahmed, Sara 11, 99–100, 103, 188 Akomfrah, John 5 Alarm Phone 2–3, 11, 13, 93–96, 105–120, 118, 145, 168, 180, 192, 194, 200, 201 Algeria 102, 112, 155 Alternative for Germany (AfD) 159 Amin, Ash 159, 163, 178 Amoore, Louise 23, 166 Amsterdam Treaty 24 Anderson, Bridget 196–197 anonymity 63–64, 83–84, 89, 90, 116, 186 anti-racist activism 41, 42, 43, 48, 56, 196 apartheid 163 apathy 12, 185, 195 appropriation 5, 45–46, 48–49, 91 Arab Uprisings 96, 189 Arendt, Hannah 44, 189–190 Arias, Santa 180 Arndt, Christoph 97, 100 arrested transit 2, 11, 65–82, 85–91, 94, 110, 136 art of government see governmentality Athens, Greece 2, 11, 34, 63, 66, 69–70, 71–80, 87, 89, 152, 201 Augusta Offshore Company 109 austerity 65

Australia 130, 140 Austria 9, 57, 70, 87, 94, 129, 152 authoritarian regimes 125 Autonomist Marxism 25 Autonomy of Migration (AoM) 10, 11, 21–22, 25–27, 29–30, 61–63, 66, 86, 126 Baaz, Mikael 7 Bachelard, Gaston 93 Balibar, Étienne 19, 23, 24, 64, 123, 158, 174, 199–200 Balkan route 9, 66, 94, 130, 192–193, 193, 199 Bandung Conference 155 Barder, Alexander 89 bare life 52–53 Bargu, Banu 50, 53, 169 Barroso, José Manuel 131–132, 137, 139, 146–147 Bauder, Harald 189–190, 191, 196 Bauman, Zygmunt 133 Bavarian Refugee Council 56 Bayat, Asef 5, 194–195 Beck, Ulrich 132, 149 behavioural transgression 50–54 Belgium 57, 65 belonging 2, 14, 28, 152–153 Ben Lhiba, Farouk 97 Benz, Martina 63 Berlin, Germany 34, 36–37, 38, 46–49, 73 Besters, Michiel 167 Bhambra, Gurminder 123, 127, 149–150, 155–156 Bialasiewicz, Luiza 24 Bigo, Didier 172 biometric borders 23, 164, 166–169

Index biopolitical citizenship 29, 166 biopolitical power 12, 25, 52–54, 55, 56, 84, 164–170, 174, 175–184 biopolitical racism 175, 177–178 biopolitical violence 164, 168–169, 174, 175–184 biosovereignty 53–54, 176 ‘Birds of Immigrants’ blog 67 blackmail 50, 51, 54, 183 Boats4People campaign 2, 11, 94–105, 104, 112, 119–120, 201 Bojadžijev, Manuela 26, 62 border regimes: Australia 130, 140; and biopolitical power 12, 25, 164, 166–169, 176, 177–173; EU and/or member state authority for 134–136; EUropean 2–4, 8–10, 12, 19, 23–24, 57–58, 64–82, 85–90, 93–121, 124–125, 131, 134–147, 152–154, 160, 166–169, 172–173, 177–184, 189, 194, 199–200; Greece 64–82, 85–90, 124, 129, 134–135; and humanitarianism 136–147, 180; Hungary 129, 130–131, 135; Mediterranean 93–121, 124–125, 134, 137–147; and racialisation 152–154, 177–179; and technology 23, 129, 166–169; United States 130, 140–141, 143, 176; and violence 3–4, 9, 12, 25, 70, 75, 78–81, 87–90, 107, 110, 113, 125, 130, 134–136, 139–140, 143, 147, 160, 164, 168–169, 177–184, 199; visibilising 21, 125, 135–136 borders: biometric borders 23, 164, 166–169; control and policing of (see border regimes); critical study of (see Critical Border Studies); democratisation of 199–201; diffusion of 23, 134, 136, 199; displacement of 23–25, 199; drawing of 8, 127, 133; externalising of 9, 23, 131, 136, 180–181; hard borders 129–131; and identity construction 9–10, 23; internal EUropean borders 9, 23–24, 65, 127, 129–136, 174; multiple meanings of 23, 136; no borders 195–198; open borders 195–198; outsourcing of 23, 131, 136, 180–181; and performance 22–23; smart borders 129, 130, 167; and technology (see border technologies) borderscapes 11, 23, 66–82, 85–90 border technologies 23, 129, 166–169 Boutang, Yann Moulier 26 Brandenburg Gate, Berlin 37, 46, 49 Bremen, Germany 85 Brexit 9, 123

227

Brussels, Belgium 34, 57 Budapest, Hungary 94 Bulgaria 9 Bussolini, Jeffrey 171 Butler, Judith 11, 49, 104, 120, 125, 127–129, 158 Cameron, David 150 Campbell, Angus 140 Canary Islands 113, 114, 156 capitalism 13, 41, 42, 150, 173, 196–197; see also neoliberalism Caravan, The 41 Carens, Joseph 196 Ceuta, Morocco 14, 113, 156 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 153 Choucha camp, Tunisia 97 circular migration policies 173–174, 181, 183 citizenship 10–11, 21–22, 27–35, 37, 40–45, 54–56, 58, 166, 179, 200–201 citizenship rights 28–29, 44–45, 55–56 City Plaza hotel, Athens 73, 201 civil society 14, 36, 65 coalitions of struggle 202 collective action 5, 12, 14, 36, 100, 187, 192–194, 202 ‘Collective of Venticinqueundici’ 145–146 colonialism 25, 123, 151, 154–155, 163, 188, 196 communal accommodation centres 2, 10, 35, 36, 47, 56 communications technologies 3, 67, 81, 82, 93–94, 96–97, 105–118, 144 Community of Portuguese Language Countries 156 Congo 50 consensus 39–40, 49–50 contingent possibilities 191, 195, 198 Corinth, Greece 70 cosmopolitanism 7, 132, 134, 149–151, 157, 159 counter-conduct 15, 53, 56, 90–91, 125, 183 Crete 69 criminalisation 58, 84, 108, 145, 172, 196, 199 Critical Border Studies (CBS) 10, 21–25, 27, 29, 30, 66, 126 Critical Citizenship Studies (CCS) 10, 11, 21–22, 27–31, 126 Croatia 9, 129 Davis, Angela 5, 48 death worlds 175, 180–181 Debrix, François 89

228

Index

De Genova, Nicholas 19, 62, 123, 129–130, 160, 166, 172, 197 de Gouges, Olympe 38–39 de Guchteneire, Paul 196 dehumanisation 10, 44, 87, 88 Delanty, Gerard 28, 132, 133, 149 Deleuze, Gilles 164, 166, 172 Delors, Jacques 124 de Maizière, Thomas 159 democratisation 199–201 Dendias, Nikos 73 deportation: and the Dublin regulation 65, 85, 87, 124, 131, 135–136, 152, 167–169, 174, 193; of exploitable labour 172, 174, 183; fear of/threat of 10, 37, 41, 42, 44–45, 50, 55, 57–58, 179, 187, 201; non-refoulement principle 125, 140; out of EUrope 3, 20, 35, 36, 55, 56, 57, 58, 68, 73, 131, 172, 174, 183; within EUrope 65, 70, 78, 80, 82, 87, 131, 135–136, 167–169 depression 35, 52, 70–71, 87, 89 Derrida, Jacques 7–8, 127, 132 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura 201 detention centres 20, 33, 35, 37, 58, 64, 67–68, 71–74, 85, 97, 110, 199, 201; see also imprisonment dignity 2, 57–58, 142 Dijstelbloem, Huub 167 Dillon, Michael 177 disciplinary power 12, 52, 164–166, 170, 182 dispositifs 164, 171–173, 182, 183 dissensus 11, 38–40, 54, 58 dissent see migratory dissent diversity 132–134, 149–151, 174 Doctors of the World 74, 77 Doty, Roxanne 143 Dublin fingerprints 167–169 Dublin Regulation 65, 85, 87, 124, 131, 135–136, 152, 167–169, 174, 193 Edding, Miriam 114 Edkins, Jenny 52, 146 Egypt 107 embodied encounters 11, 94–95, 99–105, 121 embodied practice 16, 31, 58 encounters 11, 94–95, 99–105, 115–118, 119–121 encroachment 194–195, 199 entry/exit systems 124, 166 equality 39–40, 54 Eritrea 111, 118, 146, 168 escape 2, 6, 11, 26, 31, 62–63, 68–73, 76–82, 85–91, 187

Ethiopia 50, 125 ethnography of struggle 17–21 EU Agency for Asylum 124 Eunavfor Med operation 107–108, 124, 145 Eurodac database 65, 147, 167 Eurojust 124 EUrope: border regime 2–4, 8–10, 12, 19, 23–24, 57–58, 64–82, 85–90, 93–121, 124–125, 129–131, 134–147, 152–154, 160, 166–169, 172–173, 177–184, 189, 194, 199–200; border violence 3–4, 12, 70, 75, 78–81, 87–90, 107, 110, 113, 125, 134–136, 139–140, 143, 160, 168–169, 177–184, 199; Brexit 9, 123; colonialism 25, 123, 151, 154–155, 163; and cosmopolitanism 7, 132, 134, 149–151, 157, 159; defining concept of 7–8, 123, 126–129, 157–160; dissociation from violence and death 9, 134–136, 143, 160, 178–181; and diversity 132–134, 149–151; Eunavfor Med operation 107–108, 124; EUropeanisation 9, 28, 124, 127, 134–136; EUroscepticism 123; EU–Turkey deal 9, 64, 66, 68, 110–111, 124, 130, 136; far-right politics 65, 73–74, 88, 148, 158, 159, 199; foreign policy 141; framing of 10, 11–12, 125, 127–160; and humanitarianism 10, 11, 125, 131, 137–147, 159, 180, 182; identity construction 9–10, 127, 132–134, 156; intelligence sharing 135; internal borders 9, 23–24, 65, 127, 129–136, 174; internal deportations 65, 70, 78, 80, 82, 87, 131, 135–136, 167–169; internal freedom of movement 9, 24, 134; mass migrations of 2015, 8–9, 19, 65, 67, 73, 95, 123, 124, 129, 147–148, 189, 191–192; migrant deterrence 8, 9, 65, 107, 109, 110, 124–125, 135, 139; and multiculturalism 149–151; nationalisms 123, 127, 148, 159; populism 9, 123, 158, 159, 199; and post-nationality 9, 28, 126, 127, 131, 133, 136, 157; as post-racial and postcolonial 11, 125, 147–157, 159; provincialising of 151–154, 194–195; self-representation 10, 11–12, 127–160; as transborder entity 9–10, 11, 129–136, 142, 148, 159; visibilising violence by 21, 125, 135–136 European Asylum Support Office (EASO) 124, 135 European Border and Coast Guard Agency 124, 134

Index European Commission 9, 124, 129, 130 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 65 European Council 137–138, 139, 153 European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 65 EUropean identity 9–10, 127, 132–134, 156 EUropeanisation 9, 28, 124, 127, 134–136 European Parliament 28, 124 European Studies 126, 127 Europol 124 EUro-scepticism 123 Eurosur 57, 139 EU–Turkey deal 9, 64, 66, 68, 110–111, 124, 130, 136 excess see migratory excess exclusion 2, 21, 24, 30, 41, 43, 44, 52, 88, 89, 151, 153 exploitation 13, 20, 26, 31, 42, 154, 172–174, 196 Facebook 82, 109, 116 Fadiga, Fadel 115 Fall, Saliou 115 families of the disappeared 2, 11, 95, 97–105, 99, 119–120, 145–146 family reunification 35, 57, 58, 78–79, 85 Fanon, Franz 163 far-right politics 65, 73–74, 88, 148, 158, 159, 199 Fassin, Didier 138, 142, 144, 145 Featherstone, David 120 Feldman, Gregory 24, 144, 173 feminism 38–39, 48, 196 Fidesz 159 fingerprinting 71, 77, 85, 87, 124, 135, 147, 167–169 food parcels 44, 56 Foucault, Michel: calls for ‘hyper- and pessimistic activism’ 12, 185, 199; on counter-conduct 15, 53, 56, 90–91, 125, 183; on desubjugation 58; on dispositifs 164, 171–173, 182, 183; on excess 61; on governmentality 21, 24, 66, 88, 166, 169, 173, 176; on indirect murder 118; on infamy 11, 63–64, 82–85, 86, 88, 90; Lives of Infamous Men 63–64, 82–85, 88, 90; on power 10, 12, 15–17, 27, 52, 64, 83–86, 88, 90, 164–166, 175–178, 185–187; on racism 177–178; on resistance 10, 15–17, 25, 27, 38, 125, 172, 176, 185–188, 202; on solidarity 119 framing 10, 11–12, 125, 127–160 France 57, 71, 102, 155

229

Frankfurt, Germany 34, 36, 43 freedom of movement 9, 24, 57, 62, 95, 134, 189–191 Friedrich, Hans-Peter 64 Frontex 19, 57, 64, 96, 107–112, 124, 129, 134–136, 139, 145, 147, 152, 202 Front National 159 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 132 Garelli, Glenda 20, 34 Gatti, Fabrizio 106 gender 39, 42, 63, 110, 192 Georgi, Fabian 173–174 Gerhart-Hauptmann school, Berlin 37, 47–49 Germany: Brandenburg Gate occupation 37, 46, 49; communal accommodation centres 2, 10, 35, 36, 47, 56; death of Mohammad Rahsepar 2, 10, 35, 57, 179; embassy protests 47; far-right politics 159; as final destination for migrants 71–72, 73, 75–76, 78–79, 85, 87, 94, 118; Gerhart-Hauptmann school occupation 37, 47–49; hunger strikes 2, 10–11, 33–37, 38, 46, 46, 50–54, 56, 144, 183; internal EUropean borders 129; mass migrations of 2015, 65; media reporting 2, 36; migratory dissent 2, 10–11, 33–58; ‘No Border Lasts Forever’ conference 43; Non-Citizen Congress 34, 37, 41–45; Non-Citizen protests 2, 10–11, 33–58, 38, 46, 136, 144, 154–155, 157, 157, 179, 183, 200–201; Oranienplatz occupation 37, 46, 47, 49, 157, 170; police and border guard violence 53–54, 58; ‘Refugee Bus Tour’ 36–37; ‘Refugee March’ 36–37; ‘Refugee Struggle For Freedom’ 54; ‘Refugee Tent Action’ 35–37, 45–50; residential law (Residenzpflicht), 35, 36, 49, 56 Gilroy, Paul 148 globalisation 3, 28, 29, 31, 164–165, 166–167, 188, 199 Goldberg, David Theo 148, 150, 153 Golden Dawn party 65, 73–74, 79, 159 governmentality 21, 24, 66, 88, 166, 169, 173, 176 GPS location 94, 108, 109–110, 111, 112–113 Gramsci, Antonio 34 Greece: arrested transit 2, 11, 65–82, 85–91, 94, 110, 136; austerity 65; border regime 64–82, 85–90, 129 134–135;

230

Index

borderscapes 11, 66–82, 85–90; City Plaza hotel occupation 73, 201; deportations back to 65, 70, 78, 80, 82, 87; and escape 2, 11, 62–63, 68–73, 76–82, 85–91; far-right politics 65, 73–74, 88, 159; Golden Dawn party 65, 73–74, 79, 159; hotspot detention centres 20, 68, 110, 124, 199; internal EUropean borders 9, 65, 129, 174; mass migrations of 2015, 65, 67, 73; migratory excess 2, 11, 61–91; Operation Aspida 64; police and border guard violence 75, 78, 79–80, 81, 87–90, 94, 110, 134–135, 179; protests 4, 20, 67, 68, 137; pushback operations 67, 111–112, 136; racist attacks 72, 73, 74; solidarity actions for Non-Citizen movement 34; Xenios Zeus police operation 73–74, 79 Greek Council for Refugees 75, 76, 79–80 Greek Forum of Migrants 74 Grundy-Watt, Carl 66 Haahr, Jens Henrik 126 Habermas, Jürgen 132–133, 149 Haderthauer, Christine 51 Hall, Stuart 155 Hamburg, Germany 71–72, 85 Hansen, Peo 155, 156–157, 173 hard borders 129–131 Hardt, Michael 26 Harvey, David 49 Hazara people 81 Heller, Charles 20–21, 97 Henkel, Frank 46 Hermann, Joachim 51–52 heterology 40, 53, 101–102 heterotopias 49, 179 Holocaust 148 homelessness 71, 73, 76–77, 82, 87, 188 homophobia 151 hotspots 20, 68, 110, 124, 131, 135, 199 humanitarianism 10, 11, 33, 51–54, 107–109, 120, 125, 131, 137–147, 159, 180, 182 human rights 19, 21, 44, 58, 65, 107, 115, 139, 142, 152, 182, 187, 196 Human Rights Watch 110 human trafficking 106, 108, 139, 143 Hungary 9, 78, 94, 129, 130–131, 135, 136 hunger strikes 2, 10–11, 33–36, 37, 38, 46, 46, 50–54, 56, 70, 87, 144, 183, 187 Identitarians 159 identity construction 9–10, 23, 101–102, 127, 132–134, 156

Idomeni, Greece 4, 137 Igoumenitsa, Greece 80, 193 imperceptibility 5, 26, 30–31, 61, 62, 86, 88–89, 90, 187 impossible identification 40, 101–102 imprisonment 33, 36, 53–54, 57, 67–68, 70, 72–74, 77, 81, 87, 135, 183, 187; see also detention centres inclusion 2, 21, 37, 40, 44, 55, 89, 172–173 infamy 11, 63–64, 82–85, 86, 88, 90 intelligence sharing 135 International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) 19 international citizenship 119 international law 140, 142 International Organization for Migration (IOM) 19, 147 International Women’s Space 47 interrogations 80, 147, 169 Iran 35, 50, 68–69, 71, 85 Iraq 76, 111 Isin, Engin 28, 56 Islamic extremism 76, 150 Islamic State 76 Islamophobia 130, 151 Italy 57, 70, 71, 79–82, 89, 94–98, 105–109, 124, 134, 137, 146–147, 157, 168–169, 180 Iuventa 145 Jakob, Christian 56 Jammo, Mohanad 105–106 Johnson, Corey 25 Joint Operation Poseidon 64 Jones, Alun 143 Jones, Reece 25, 129 Jonsson, Stefan 155, 173 Jugend Rettet 145 Juris, Jeffrey 18 Kafka, Franz 185–186 Karakayalı, Serhat 26, 62, 151 Kasparek, Bernd 131 Khorasani, Ashkan 51 King, Natasha 95 Kinisi solidarity network 81 knowledge production 18–21 Kopp, Hagen 98, 102 Kurdi, Alan 94 labour 26, 31, 41, 57, 58, 89, 154, 172–174, 183, 196 laisser-faire/security tension 164, 173–174, 183

Index Lampedusa, Italy 14, 97, 105, 118, 137, 139, 146–147, 168, 180 Langa, Napuli 36, 45, 47, 49 Lavrio, Greece 71 Before the Law (Kafka) 185–186 law of the sea 107, 144, 182 ‘Left-to-Die’ incident (2011) 96–97, 107 left-wing politics 26–27, 62 Lega 159 legal representation 65, 77, 78, 87 Leggeri, Fabrice 129 Leitner, Johanna 64 Lesvos, Greece 2, 11, 20, 63, 66–73, 69, 85, 94, 192 Libya 96–97, 107–109, 124, 138, 139, 144, 160, 168, 189 life: bare life 52–53; power of 12, 53, 175–177; power over 12, 53, 165, 175–177; weaponisation of 50–53, 183 life worlds 11, 103 Lilja, Mona 7, 170–171 lines of fight 12, 198–202 lines of flight 12, 53, 62, 185, 198–202 lip-sewing 34, 35, 52 Lisbon Treaty 24, 141–142 Lives of Infamous Men (Foucault) 63–64, 82–85, 88, 90 Loubeyre, Nathalie 96 Luxemburg, Rosa 190 Macedonia 9, 174 McNevin, Anne 29 Madison, Soyini 18 Mali 125, 201 Malta 105–106, 108, 134 Manners, Ian 142 ‘Map Mos Maiorum’ project 152 ‘March of Hope’ 94, 192 ‘March to Freedom’ 57 Marciniak, Katarzyna 54 Marcus, George 18 Mare Liberum project 112 Mare Nostrum operation 107, 180 marginalisation 10, 28, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 55, 87–88 maritime emergencies 2–3, 11, 93–97, 105–118, 137–139, 144–145, 168, 194 maritime law 107, 144, 182 Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) 105–106, 108–109 martyrdom 34, 51 Marzoug, Chamesddine 180 Mbembe, Achille 5, 175, 190 media reporting 2, 3, 36, 111, 140, 142–143, 153, 192

231

medical care 33, 35, 50–54, 58, 74, 77, 87 Mediterranean: Alarm Phone 2–3, 11, 13, 93–96, 105–120, 118, 145, 180, 192, 194, 201; Boats4People campaign 2, 11, 94–105, 104, 112, 119–120, 201; border regime 93–121, 124–125, 134, 137–147; commercial maritime traffic 106, 108, 113, 145; deaths 2, 11, 72, 93, 96, 99, 105–106, 109, 113–114, 118–119, 137–139, 142–143, 146–147, 168, 180, 192, 194; disappeared people 2, 11, 95, 97–105, 114, 115, 119–120, 145–146; Eunavfor Med operation 107–108, 124, 145; ‘Left-to-Die’ incident (2011) 96–97, 107; Mare Liberum project 112; Mare Nostrum operation 107, 180; maritime emergencies 2–3, 11, 93–94, 96–97, 105–118, 137–139, 144–145, 168, 194; migrant deterrence 107, 109, 110, 139; migratory solidarity 2–3, 11, 93–121; numbers of crossings 96, 111, 113, 192, 194; pull-back operations 114–115; push-back operations 107, 111–112, 145, 182; surveillance 107–108, 112, 138, 139; Triton operation 107–108; violence 107, 110, 113, 134, 139–140, 143, 180; WatchTheMed platform 97, 100, 101; weather conditions 106, 110, 113; see also Aegean Sea Meijer, Albert 167 Meins, Holger 33, 51 Melilla, Morocco 14, 113, 156 mental health 35, 52, 70–71, 87, 89 Merkel, Angela 50, 134, 150 Mexico 140–141, 143, 176 Mezzadra, Sandro 6, 27, 29–30, 55, 62, 120, 125, 142, 153, 173, 176, 183, 191, 201 Michelsen, Nicholas 53 migrant citizenships 30 migrant deterrence 8, 9, 65, 107, 109, 110, 124–125, 135, 139, 148 migrant resistance: as catalyst 3, 15–17, 58, 128–129, 198; as diagnostics 3, 10, 11–12, 126–129, 135–136, 151–160, 198; dissent 2, 10–11, 12, 33–58, 171, 187–188; as embodied practice 16, 31, 58; excess 2, 11, 12, 61–91, 171, 187–188; exposition of concept 5–7; Foucault on 10, 15–17, 25, 27, 38, 125, 172, 176, 185–188, 202; future possibilities 198–202; as method 3, 10, 13–15, 17–21, 27, 30–31, 58, 198; and movements of

232

Index

freedom 12, 184, 188, 189–191, 198, 202; multiplicity and diversity of 3, 6–7, 30–31; necroresistance 53, 56, 144, 183; politicality of 1–2, 4, 5–7, 62; and power 7, 10, 12, 15–17, 27, 31, 90–91, 163, 170–174, 176, 182–184, 185–187; Rancière on 38–40, 43, 58, 101–102; solidarity 2–3, 11, 12, 93–121, 171, 187–188, 192, 202; transversality of 3, 31, 135; and utopian yearning 5, 191–195 migrant rights 33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 44, 54–58, 72 migratory dissent 2, 10–11, 12, 33–58, 171, 187–188 migratory excess 2, 11, 12, 61–91, 171, 187–188 migratory solidarity 2–3, 11, 12, 93–121, 171, 187–188, 192, 202 Milan, Mathurin 83 Milo detention centre, Italy 97 Missing at Borders website 104 Mitropoulos, Angela 6, 26–27, 196 mobile commons 7, 117, 187, 201 mobile phones 82, 96–97, 105–106, 107, 109–113, 115–116 Mogherini, Federica 138, 139, 140–141 Moria detention centre, Lesvos 68 Morin, Edgar 132 Morocco 107, 112–115, 116–117, 194 ‘Mos Maiorum’ operation 152, 153 Moulin, Carolina 30 Mountz, Alison 25 movement as motion 6, 117, 188 movement as politics 6, 117, 188 movements of freedom 12, 184, 188, 189–191, 198, 202 MSS ruling 65 multiculturalism 149–151, 174 multi-sited ethnography 18, 33, 125 Munich, Germany 33, 34, 41, 45, 50–54, 56, 144, 169 murder 75, 78, 89 Mytilene Strait 67 naming 40–45, 101–102 nationalism 21, 31, 74, 123, 127, 148, 159, 173–174, 176, 183 NATO 110, 145 Nazism 175, 178 Ndiaye, Cheik 115 Ndiaye, Pape 115 necropolitics 12, 25, 144, 175–182 necroresistance 53, 56, 144, 183

Negri, Antonio 26 Neilson, Brett 6, 27, 120, 125, 176 neoliberalism 5, 27, 29, 31, 164–165, 169, 173–174, 176, 183, 199 neo-nationalism 173–174, 176, 183 Netherlands 57 Niger 125, 201 Nigeria 50, 125 Nobel peace prize 96, 131, 145–146 ‘No Border Lasts Forever’ conference 43 NoBorder movement 67, 72, 113, 139 Non-Citizen Congress 34, 37, 41–45 Non-Citizen movement 2, 10–11, 33–58, 38, 46, 136, 144, 154–155, 157, 179, 183, 200–201 non-refoulement principle 125, 140 No One Is Illegal movement 139 Northern Ireland 33, 53 Novak, Paolo 30 ‘No Way’ campaign 140 Nyers, Peter 28–29, 30, 90 Odugbesan, Abimbola 55 Oloferne 97 open borders 195–198 Operation Aspida 64 Operation Sovereign Borders 140 Oranienplatz, Berlin 37, 46, 47, 49, 157, 170 Orban, Viktor 130 othering 2, 5, 10, 14, 21, 148 outsourcing 23, 131, 136, 180–181 Pagani detention centre, Lesvos 67, 71, 72 Pakistan 50 Palermo, Italy 97–98, 104 Pallister-Wilkins, Polly 167 Papadopoulos, Dimitris 5, 26, 29, 86, 117 Papaleonidopoules, Jorgos 79 Parker, Noel 22 Patras, Greece 2, 11, 63, 66, 70, 71, 73, 79–82, 80, 85, 87–89, 179, 193 patriarchy 151 Pécoud, Antoine 196 performativity 22–23, 49 Perkowski, Nina 98, 100 Pezzani, Lorenzo 20–21, 97 Pin-Fat, Veronique 52 police order 39–40, 54 policy-relevant scholarship 19 populism 9, 123, 150, 158, 159, 199 Portugal 156 possibilia 191, 198 postcolonialism 11, 125, 147–157, 159

Index post-nationality 9, 28, 126, 127, 131, 133, 136, 157, 164–165 post-raciality 11, 125, 147–157 power: analytics of 3, 12, 16–17, 163–166, 182; asymmetric power relations 98, 120, 148, 149; biopolitical 12, 25, 52–54, 55, 56, 84, 164–170, 174, 175–184; confusion of 181–184; disciplinary 12, 52, 164–166, 170, 182; and dispositifs 164, 171–173, 182, 183; Foucault on 10, 12, 15–17, 27, 52, 64, 83–86, 88, 90, 164–166, 175–178, 185–187; and infamy 64, 83–85, 86, 88, 90; of life 12, 53, 175–177; over life 12, 53, 165, 175–177; and resistance 7, 10, 12, 15–17, 27, 31, 90–91, 163, 170–174, 176, 182–184, 185–187; sovereign 12, 52–54, 56, 64, 90, 164–166, 170, 176, 182 Praksis 79, 81 Pro Asyl 79–80 Prodi, Romano 133, 141 ‘Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry’ 140–141 Prozorov, Sergei 61, 182, 185–187, 190 Pugliese, Joseph 178 pull-back operations 114–115 push-back operations 8, 67, 107, 111–112, 136, 145, 182 racialisation 2, 14, 25, 65, 73, 87, 88, 102–104, 125, 147–157, 169, 177–179, 181 racial profiling 73, 151, 152–153 racism 42, 48, 50, 65, 72–74, 123, 130, 147–154, 174, 175, 177–179 Racist Violence Recording Network 74 Rahsepar, Mohammad 2, 10, 35, 57, 179 Rajaram, Prem 66 Rancière, Jacques 11, 34, 38–40, 43, 49, 58, 101–102 rape 77, 89 Rapid Border Intervention Teams 64 ‘Refugee Bus Tour’ 36–37 ‘Refugee March’ 36–37 ‘Refugee Struggle For Freedom’ 54 ‘Refugee Tent Action’ 35–37, 45–50 research methodology 13–15, 17–21 research militancy 10, 20–21 residential law (Residenzpflicht) 35, 36, 49, 56 resistance see migrant resistance rights see citizenship rights; human rights; migrant rights Rigo, Enrica 156 Rindermarkt, Munich 50

233

Rodriguez-Garavito, Cesar 201–202 Romania 78 romanticisation 27, 62, 86, 188 Rumford, Chris 22–23, 126–127, 132, 133, 134, 149 Rygiel, Kim 29, 166 Sahara 81, 160, 180, 201 Salvamento Maritimo 113, 114, 115, 117 Samaddar, Ranabir 66, 88 Samaras, Antonis 73 Sands, Bobby 33, 51, 53 Sarkozy, Nicolas 150 satellite phones 106, 107, 108–109, 116, 144 Scheel, Stephan 5, 166–167 Schengen area 24, 64, 124, 136 Schwenken, Helen 63 Schwiertz, Helge 55 Sea-Watch 109, 112 self-harm 34, 42, 52–53, 187 Senegal 125 Serbia 9, 78, 129 sexual violence 77, 89, 151, 179 Sharma, Nandita 196–197 Sicily 97–98, 146, 147, 157, 168 Sierra Leone 50 sleep deprivation 48 Slovenia 9 smart borders 129, 130, 167; see also biometric borders smart phones see communications technologies; mobile phones social movements 5–6, 7, 14, 28, 49, 62, 101 societies of control 166 solidarity see migratory solidarity Solomos, John 148 South Africa 163 sovereign power 12, 52–54, 56, 64, 90, 164–166, 170, 176, 182 Spain 112–115, 156 spatial transgressions 45–50, 187 Speer, Marc 131 split temporality 201 Squire, Vicki 23 Statewatch 152 Stephenson, Niamh 5, 26, 86 Stock, Paul 128 Strait of Gibraltar 113 Strange Encounters (Ahmed) 99–100, 103 subaltern cosmopolitan legality 201–202 subjectivisation 38–40, 43, 53, 101–102, 191 subordinate inclusion 89, 172–173, 186 suffragette movement 52 suicide 2, 10, 34, 35, 52, 57, 71, 87, 168, 179

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Index

surveillance 107–108, 112, 129, 130, 138, 139, 165, 169 Sweden 65, 71 Syria 63, 75, 76–77, 85, 93–94, 111, 189 Taliban 81, 82 Tazzioli, Martina 20, 34, 136 technology see border technologies; communications technologies terrorism 51, 196 thanatopolitics 175; see also necropolitics third-country agreements 8, 124–125, 135; see also EU–Turkey deal Thomaz, Diana 30 torture 35, 79–80, 88, 89, 160, 179 ‘Traces Back’ project 67–68, 69 ‘Transnational Tour 2013’ 57 transversality 3, 31, 103, 135 Treaty of Rome 155 Triton operation 107–108 trust 116–117 Tsianos, Vassilis 5, 26, 29, 86, 117 Tunisia 2, 11, 95, 96–105, 107, 109, 118, 180, 189, 194 Turkey 9, 64–69, 76–77, 85, 87, 107, 110–112, 117, 124, 130, 136, 192, 194 Turner, Bryan 28 Tyler, Imogen 54 Ude, Christian 51–52 Ulu, Turgay 56, 57 unaccompanied minors 68–73, 81, 82, 87 unembodied encounters 11, 94–95, 115–118, 121 United Kingdom 9, 34, 52, 123, 155, 156 United Nations Charter 142 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 19 United States 130, 140–141, 143, 176 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 196 utopian yearning 5, 191–195 Valletta Summit 124–125 Valluvan, Sivamohan 150 Van Houtum, Henk 166 Van Rompuy, Herman 131–132 Vaughan-Williams, Nick 22, 139, 176–177 Vietnamese ‘boat-people’ 119 Vinthagen, Stellan 7, 170–171 violence: biopolitical 164, 168–169, 174, 175–184; and border regimes 3–4, 9,

12, 25, 70, 75, 78–81, 87–90, 107, 110, 113, 125, 130, 134–136, 139–140, 143, 147, 160, 164, 168–169, 177–184, 199; EU and/or member state responsibility for 134–136; EUropean dissociation from 9, 134–136, 143, 160, 178–181; and hunger strikes 52–54; location of 179–181; in the Mediterranean 107, 110, 113, 134, 139–140, 143, 180; and migrant deterrence 107, 109, 110; monopoly of 53, 135; by police and border guards 53–54, 58, 70, 75, 78–81, 87–90, 94, 110, 113, 130, 134–135, 147, 168–169; racist attacks 72, 73, 74, 158; to the self (see self-harm; suicide); sexual 77, 89, 151, 179; torture 35, 79–80, 88, 89, 160, 179; visibilising 21, 125, 135–136 visas 8, 75–76, 86–87, 135, 166, 167, 174 Voice Refugee Forum 41 Vougias, Spyros 67 Vrasti, Wanda 18 vulnerability 1, 57–58, 62, 103–104 Walker, R.B.J. 17, 126 Walters, William 24, 66, 115, 126, 140, 144, 158, 169, 183 Warf, Barney 180 WatchTheMed platform 97, 100, 101; see also Alarm Phone Weheliye, Alexander G. 178, 188 Welcome to Europe 67 WhatsApp 93–94, 109, 116 Williams, Jill 176 World Health Organisation 93 Wright, Cynthia 196–197 wrong behaviour 50–54 wrong/ing names 40–45 wrong/ing spaces 45–50 Würzburg, Germany 10, 35 Xenios Zeus police operation 73–74, 79 Yazidi community 63, 76–79 Youth without Borders 41, 67 Zalewski, Marysia 17–18 Zerai, Mussie 96–97, 108, 117 zero tolerance policies 140–141 Ziarek, Ewa 52 Zuwarah, Libya 108